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THOMAS CARLYLE 
AS A CRITIC OF LITERATURE 



THOMAS CARLYLE 
AS A CRITIC OF LITERATURE 



BY 



FREDERICK WILLIAM ROE, Ph.D. 




ftfo fork 
THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1910 

All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1910 
By The Columbia University Press 

Printed from type January, 1910 



Press of 

The New era printing Company 

Lancaster, Pa. 



'n!.A256925 



This Monograph has been approved by the Department of Eng- 
lish in Columbia University as a contribution to knowledge worthy 

of publication. 

A. H. THORNDIKE, 

Secretary. 



It is a strange work with me, studying these Essays over again : ten 
years of my life lie strangely written there ; it is I, and it is not I, that 
wrote all that I They are as I could make them — among the peat-bogs and 
other confusions. It rather seems the people like them in spite of all their 
crabbedness. Carlyle to his Mother, 1839 (Ne7V Letters, I, 178). 



PREFACE 

The present study was begun some four years ago at the 
suggestion of Professor W. P. Trent and of the late Pro- 
fessor George R. Carpenter. It was thought that an account 
of Carlyle as a critic of literature would be of value, not only 
as an appreciation of a great personality on a different side 
from that usually considered, but also as a contribution to the 
history of literary criticism in England. In this belief, and 
with these ends in view, the following chapters have been 
written. The new interpretation in the first chapter of Car- 
lyle's so-called conversion has not been made without a search- 
ing examination of the published biographical material, and 
with the sole purpose of setting the facts in their right rela- 
tions. 

To the English department of Columbia University under 
whose direction I have worked my obligations are many. It is 
a pleasure to record my gratefulness to Professor Trent, whose 
criticism and encouragement have been constant and helpful. 
My thanks are also due to Professor Brander Matthews and 
to Professor W. A. Neilson, formerly of Columbia, now of 
Harvard University, for stimulating suggestions. To Pro- 
fessor A. H. Thorndike, who went over the entire work in 
manuscript with me, I am especially indebted for much valu- 
able criticism. 

I am grateful also to Professor J. W. Cunlift'e, and to Asso- 
ciate Professor H. B. Lathrop, of the English department of 
the University of Wisconsin, for kindly interest and counsel. 

In the preparation of this essay I have used the following 
books, besides others to which reference is made in the foot- 
notes: Carlyle's Works (especially the Critical and Miscellan- 
eous Essays in seven volumes, copyright edition, Chapman and 
Hall, London) ; Reminiscences by Thomas Carlyle (2 vols., ed. 
Norton, New York, 1887) ; Early Letters (ed. Norton, New 
York, 1886) ; Letters, 1826-1836 (ed. Norton, New York, 



1889) ; Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle (ed. Nor- 
ton, New York, 1887) ; Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and 
Ralph Waldo Emerson (2 vols., rev. ed., Boston, 1886) ; New 
Letters of Thomas Carlyle (2 vols., New York, 1904) ; Letters 
and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (ed. Froude, 2 vols., 
New York, 1883) ; New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh 
Carlyle (2 vols., New York, 1903) ; Collectanea, Thomas Car- 
lyle (ed. S. A. Jones, Canton, Pa., 1903) ; Lectures on the 
History of Literature (London, 1892) ; Two Note-Books of 
Thomas Carlyle (ed. Norton, New York, The Grolier Club, 
1898) ; Last Words of Thomas Carlyle (New York, 1892) ; 
Thomas Carlyle (life by Froude, 4 vols., New York, 1882 
and 1884) ; Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas 
Carlyle (by Shepherd and Williamson, 2 vols., London, 1881) ; 
Edinburgh Sketches and Memories (by Masson, London, 
1892) ; Bielschowsky's Life of Goethe (3 vols., by Cooper, 
New York, 1907-8). 

Madison, Wisconsin. 



CONTENTS 

Chapter I. 
The Foundation of a Literary Life i 

Chapter IL 
Carlyle's Ideals of Literature 26 

Chapter IIL 
Carlyle's Ideals of Criticism 46 

Chapter IV. 
Carlyle's Relation to the Literature of Romanticism. 72 

Chapter V. 

Carlyle's Place in the Introduction of German Lit- 
erature into England 90 

Chapter VI. 
The Essays on Goethe 99 

Chapter VII. 
Carlyle and Voltaire 104 

Chapter VIII. 
The English Essays 114 

Chapter IX. 
From Criticism to Prophecy 139 

Chapter X. 
Carlyle's Criticism 144 

\ 



XI 



CHAPTER I 
The Foundation of a Literary Life 

It was an integral part of the faith of Thomas Carlyle that 
circumstances do not wholly determine human destiny. Like 
the belief of so many great men this of Carlyle's was rooted in 
personal experience. The struggles of his early life, prolonged 
and intensified' in exceptional measure, proclaim the power of 
the human will. Yet it is scarcely a paradox to affirm that 
upon Carlyle, perhaps the most conspicuous example of indi- 
vidualism in the nineteenth century, the influence of environ- 
ment was both powerful and permanent. " He knew the world 
profoundly," says Mr. Brownell, " but he viewed it from Eccle- 
fechan."^ His birth in this village of southern Scotland; his 
descent from Covenanter stock ; his boyhood among a sternly 
moral but narrow-minded peasantry, in the midst of a rigid, if 
not a harsh, domestic economy, all had their part in fashioning 
a character fairly steeped in racial and religious prejudice. 
These early surroundings left upon him an impress that edu- 
cation and contact with the world never effaced. Into all his 
writings, from essay to history, there went something of the 
narrowness and austerity, together with something of the 
harshness, of the Scottish peasant. 

Though his life at Ecclefechan was anything but joyful, 
Carlyle gratefully recognized its worth.- "I too," says Teufels- 
drockh, " acknowledge the ail-but omnipotence of early culture 
and nurture." James Carlyle, the father, was what the son 
might have become had he never left his native village. In 
intellectual, moral and religious temper there was a remarkable 
similarity between the elder and the younger Carlyle. Like his 
son, the stone-mason possessed a native strength of mind, a 
rough controlling force of will, a stubborn integrity in all his 
work and dealing, together with a frank contempt for life on 

^Victorian Prose Masters, 94. ^ Rem., I, 44 (Norton's edition). 



its lighter sides. Though deeply religious, he was " irascible " 
and " choleric," and his grim taciturnity made his heart seem 
" as if walled in."^ He distrusted poetry and fiction as min- 
istering to worldly pleasures. " He never, I believe," says his 
son, " read three pages of Burns's Poems ; poetry, fiction in 
general, he had universally seen treated as not only idle, but 
false and criminal."* The speech of James Carlyle was bold, 
metaphorical, and humorously exaggerated — " he said a thing 
and it ran through the country."^ Mental characteristics 
prominent in the elder Carlyle reappeared almost without ex- 
ception in the son, though they were somewhat softened by the 
mild afifectionate nature of the mother. There was little 
enough of love in Thomas Carlyle, little enough of the gentle- 
ness that sometimes tempers great natures ; but there was very 
considerably more afifection in him than in his father. " The 
strongest personal passion which he experienced through all 
his life," says Froude, " was his affection for his mother."* 
The relations between Margaret Carlyle and her gifted son, as 
revealed in numerous letters, were touchingly sympathetic, and 
they go far to explain the depth and warmth of human feel- 
ing in the essay on Burns and in the Life of John Sterling. 
The boy's education began at home mainly under the direc- 
tion of his father.^ " He had ' educated ' me," says Carlyle, 
"against much advice, I believe, and chiefly, if not solely, from 
his own noble faith; James Bell (one of our wise men) had 
told him : ' Educate a boy, and he grows up to despise his 
ignorant parents.' My father once told me this; and added: 
' Thou has not done so, God be thanked for it !' "^ At about 
seven the lad was put into the village school, where he began 
Latin and where he was reported " complete in English."* 
" Swamped " here in the Latin, he was " pulled afloat " by the 
minister's son, when he made " rapid and sure " way. At ten 

^Ibid., I, IS. 

* Ibid., I, 12, 14; cf. Conway, Thomas Carlyle, 32. 
"Masson, Edinburgh Sketches, 281. 'Life, I, 188; cf. Rem., I, 16. 
^ " Of my letters taught me by my mother, I have no recollection what- 
ever; of reading scarcely any" (Rem., I, 45). 
'Ibid., I, 18. » Froude, Life, I, 13. 



he was taken by his father to Annan Academy. School hfe 
at this place " among those coarse tyrannous cubs " (the boys 
who tormented young Carlyle so long as he obeyed his mother's 
command not to fight) left embittered memories ; but there 
was real intellectual progress. " Latin and French I did get 
to read with fluency. Latin quantity was a frightful chaos, 
and I had to learn it afterwards ; some geometry. Algebra, 
arithmetic, tolerably well. Vague outlines of geography I 
learnt ; all the books I could get were also devoured. Greek 
consisted of the alphabet merely."^** 

The four years at Annan were followed by the university 
course at Edinburgh, where Carlyle satisfied his passion for 
knowledge in the midst of most discouraging conditions. Pro- 
fessor Masson's gleanings from old university records yield 
some definite information as to the studies which were there 
pursued. For the first session Carlyle was registered in a hu- 
manity class (which meant Latin) and a first Greek class; for 
the second, he took up mathematics and logic, since there was 
no second course in Latin. Greek and mathematics were con- 
tinued the third year, and moral philosophy was begun. The 
classics and philosophy were dropped in the fourth year, while 
mathematics was kept up, along with natural philosophy." 
Carlyle's class-work at the university ended in the summer of 
1813, in his eighteenth year, when he was qualified for the 
M.A. degree. This he did not take ; " but in that," says Pro- 
fessor Masson, "he was not in the least singular."^^ If Car- 
lyle's fellow-students predicted his future on the showing he 
made in the class room, they must have reserved him for dis- 
tinction in mathematics ; for in this branch alone did he display 
enthusiasm and talent, chiefly because of the superior teaching 
of Professor Leslie. " For several years," he says, " geometry 
shone before me as the noblest of all sciences, and I prosecuted 
it in all my best hours and moods."^^ 

"/feid, "Masson, Edinburgh Sketches, 230-236. 

"Ibid., 239. 

^'Froude, Life, I, 21. Froude says that Carlyle carried off no prizes 
(I, 21) ; Masson (Edinburgh Sketches, 234) refers to a tradition that he 
took first prize in the second mathematical class. There is abundant proof, 



The account of his studies in Latin and Greek offers a sug- 
gestive contrast : *' In the classical field," he records, " I am 
truly as nothing. Homer I learnt to read in the original with 
difficulty, after Wolf's broad flash of light thrown into it; 
^schylus and Sophocles mainly in translations. Tacitus and 
Virgil became really interesting to me ; Homer and ^schylus 
above all; Horace, egotistical, leichtfcrtig, in sad fact I never 
cared for; Cicero, after long and various trials, always proved 
a windy person and a wearisome to me, extinguished altogether 
by Middleton's excellent though misjudging life of him."^* 
Crippled in Greek in the preparatory stage, Carlyle did not 
much increase his knowledge of it at the university. He never 
made up this deficiency, and the little Greek he knew " must 
have faded from disuse," according to the opinion of Professor 
Masson.^^ Precisely how much his work in criticism suffered 
from this limited acquaintance with the language and literature 
of Greece it is of course not possible to say. No study could 
have removed the native bias of his mind, for Carlyle was 
born a romanticist. Still it is hard not to believe that a sound 
classical training would have much increased his appreciation 
of essentially literary values, such as individual beauties of 
thought and phrase, and have given to his critical faculties a 
balance and restraint which they so often failed to exercise. 
For we should not forget that apart from the poorly taught and 
wholly inadequate classics, Carlyle had no university study to 

in any case, of his excellence in mathematics. Philosophy under " the 
famous Brown " fell upon Carlyle as " mere dazzle and moonshine " (ibid,, 
23s). 

" Froude, Life, I, 20. 

^^ Edinburgh Sketches, 230. Carlyle's appreciation of Greek literature as 
expressed in his Lectures on the history of literature seems limited, cur- 
sory, and not enthusiastic. His remarks on the whole indicate that he was 
in a field which he neither knew well nor greatly cared to know (cf. 
Lectures, 36). A sentence here and there in the essay, records a liking 
for Homer (e. g., EsA^y^, xil, 161). " Plato he does not read," said Emer- 
son, "and he disparaged Socrates" (Emerson, Works, V, 16; cf. Conway, 
Life, 91 ; New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Intro., 81 ; 
Correspondence, Emerson and Carlyle, H, 218). Carlyle expresses but a 
feeble interest in the neo-classicism of Goethe. 



awaken his interest and cultivate his taste in the formal ele- 
ments of literature. 

His real university was the library, where he found the 
materials for laying the foundation of a literary life. His pas- 
sion for reading has already been referred to, but the time of 
its appearance it is not possible to fix ; probably Carlyle himself 
did not remember. He may have read the Arabian Nights, 
for example, before he went to Annan. His reference to his 
father's prohibition against this book indicates that there had 
been a copy at home.^*^ Many of the books that were devoured 
at Annan were novels, some of Smollett's being among them.^'^ 
But after Carlyle entered Edinburgh, a greatly expanded taste 
in reading developed. Professor Masson found a record of 
the following volumes, drawn from the University library dur- 
ing December and January of Carlyle's first term : " Robert- 
sons History of Scotland, Vol. H ; Cook's Voyages; Byron's 
Narrative, i. e., ' the Honorable John Byron's Narrative of the 
Great Distresses suffered by Himself and his companions on 
the Coast of Patagonia, 1740-6'; the first volume of Gibbon; 
two volumes of Shakespeare ; a volume of the Arabian Nights, 
Congreve's Works; another volume of the Arabian Nights; 
two volumes of Hume's England; Gil Bias; a third volume of 
Shakespeare ; and a volume of the Spectator."^^ For a youth 
of fourteen with no guide but his own instincts, this is, as 
Professor Masson points out, a remarkable list of books, espe- 
cially if we consider that probably not one of them had any- 
thing to do with the boy's academic studies. The next year 
he read with equal independence in the selection of titles. 
Besides several volumes of travel and voyages, he took from 
the library Fielding, Smollett, a translation of Don Quixote, 
and two or three works in philosophy.^" The records for the 
last two years are lost, but this youthful passion for reading 
must have rapidly increased. To the end of his life Carlyle felt 
that the one service Edinburgh University rendered him was 

" It is interesting to know that the crabbed grandfather, Thomas Car- 
lyle, had a liking for Arabian Nights. Rem., I, 29. 

"Conway, Life, 32. ^^ Edinburgh Sketches, 231. 

'° E. g., Reid's Inquiry and Locke's Essay. 



6 

the use of its library. " From the chaos of that Library," says 
Teiifelsdrockh, " I succeeded in fishing-up more books perhaps 
than had been known to the very keepers thereof. The foun- 
dation of a Literary Life was hereby laid ; I learned, on my own 
strength, to read fluently in almost all cultivated languages, on 
almost all subjects and sciences ; farther, as man is ever the 
prime object to man, already it was my favorite employment 
to read character in speculation, and from the writing to con- 
strue the Writer."^'' In his inaugural address before the uni- 
versity in 1866, there is similar testimony : " What I have found 
the University did for me, is. That it taught me to read."-^ 
Scattered accounts of Carlyle's reading from 1813 to 1819, 
when he began to study German, show a steady trend toward a 
literary life and throw much light upon his intellectual develop- 
ment. While at Annan (1814-16) he read '* incessantly."-- 
We can judge of the range of this reading from his early let- 
ters which begin at this period and contain numerous allusions 
to books. " What books have you been reading ?" he writes to 
his friend Mitchell, *' And how did you like Shakespeare ? 
Since I saw you I have toiled through many a thick octavo — 
many of them to little purpose. Byron's and Scott's Poems 
[I have read] and must admire — though you recollect, we used 

'^Sartor, 79. 

^Essays, VII, 174. If the passage quoted above from Sartor be under- 
stood to refer to Carlyle's four years at the University, it is undoubtely an 
over-statement. " Only in Latin and French, and to some extent in 
Greek," says Masson, " could he have ranged beyond English in his read- 
ings ; nor can his readings, in whatever language, have been so vast and 
miscellaneous as Teufelsdrockh's " (Edinburgh Sketches, 240). 'Carlyle 
probably included the browsings not only of four college years, but of a 
much longer period, extending down to 1820 and even later; together with 
the continual reading done in the library of Edward Irving and elsewhere. 
He was in Edinburgh as a divinity student, it will be remembered, during 
the first year after his college course. Then came the mastership in 
mathematics at Annan Academy for two years, followed by the mastership 
of a school at Kirkaldy, set up in opposition to one conducted by Irving. 
This position Carlyle threw up in disgust at the end of 1818, and again went 
to Edinburgh with Irving, where he lived for most of the time (broken by 
vacations at home and journeyings with the Bullers) until his removal to 
Craigenputtock in 1828. 

^ Froude, Life, I, 29. 



to give Campbell a decided preference, and I still think, with 
justice. Have you ever seen Iloole's Tassof I have among 
many others read it, Leonidas (Glover's), the Epigoniad (Wil- 
kie's), Obcron/^ Savage's Poems, etc. Miss Porter's Scottish 
Chiefs and IVaverley have been the principal of my novels. 
With regard to Waverley I cannot help remarking that in my 
opinion it is the best novel that has been published these 
thirty years. "^* In addition to these works, many others were 
read during the two years at Annan. In English he read 
Akenside,-° Crabbe,-*' Miss Porter's Tliaddcus of Warsaw,^'^ 
Scott's Guy Manncring^^ and Watcrloo,^^ Chesterfield, The 
Spectator ("his jaunty manner but ill accorded with my sulky 
humours "),^° Plume's Essays ("as a whole I am delighted 
with the book"),^^ Berkeley's Principles of Knozvlcdge,^- to- 
gether with numerous works on travel and mathematics, in- 
cluding Newton's Principia.^^ Among French works, he read 
Voltaire's La Pucelle,^* Moliere's Co medics, '-^^ and some few 
extracts of Fenelon's Dialogues des Morts. Carlyle's efforts 
with Greek continued unfruitful. He writes to Mitchell : " I 
am glad to hear that you are getting forward so well with 
Homer — I know almost nothing about him — having never 
read anything but Pope's translation, and not above a single 
book of the original, and that several years ago. Indeed I 
know very little of the Greek at any rate. I have several times 
begun to read Xenophon's Anabasis completely ; but always 
gave it up in favour of something else."^" At this period there 
were also .Cicero's De Officiis and Lucan's Pharsalia;^'^ the lat- 
ter no doubt in translation. 

His life at Kirkcaldy was brightened by the companionship 
of the gifted Edward Irving, who possessed a good library. 

^ " Doubtless Sotheby's version of Wieland's Oberon." Norton. 
^ Early Letters, 9. -" Ibid., 32. 

=»"I like it"; ibid., 23. ""Ibid., 34. 

=»/&id., 35. ^'Ibid., 21. 

^^ Ibid., 16. """Ibid., 25 

^ Ibid., 20. ^^ Ibid., 35. 

"* " V. is the most impudent, blaspheming, libidinous blackguard that 
ever lived." Ibid., 17. '■"^ Early Letters, 35. 

'"Conway, Life, 166. ^'' Ibid., 31. 



8 

" Irving's library was of great use to me ; Gibbon, Hume, etc., 
I think I must have read it ahiiost through. "^^ " We had 
books from Edinburgh College-Library too."^^ Mathematics 
was giving way to " history and other lighter matters,"*" while 
the books mentioned in the early letters indicate that he read 
with avidity whatever he could find in English and French. 
Gibbon and Hume were read through, and probably Robert- 
son, if he had not been read earlier.*^ " The whole historical 
triumvirate are abundantly destitute of virtuous feeling — or 
indeed of any feeling at all."*- Carlyle read fiction, but with 
diminishing pleasure, except in the case of Scott's novels, in 
which his interest was still keen. " You have no doubt seen 
the Talcs of my Landlord," he writes. " Certainly, Wavcrlcy 
and Mannering and the Black Dzvarf were never written by the 
same person."*^ The perusal of eight volumes of Smollett " and 
others, was a much harder and more unprofitable task,"** than 
the reading of history ; and yet in spite of his developing taste 
for more serious books the earlier pleasure in romantic stories 
was not wholly dead. " The other night I sat up till four 
o'clock reading Matthew Lewis's Monk. It is the most stupid 
and villainous novel I have read for a great while. "*^ Lalla 
Rookh, and Childe Harold, canto fourth, were also a part of the 
reading of this period. In French there were Pascal's 
Lettres Provincial cs,^*^ Mme. de Stael's Germany,*'' La Rouche- 
foucault,*^ and Montaigne,*" — if we may infer from a brief 
quotation from him. " On Irving's shelves," Carlyle says, 
" were the small Didot French Classics in quantity, with my 
appetite sharp. "'^'^ Everything, in fact, in English and French 
was greedily devoured by the maturing }'oung schoolmaster. 
Not books of literature only, but of mathematics, theology, 
philosophy, and travel filled the spare hours ; and the corre- 

^^Rem., II, 28. *'Ibid., 58. 

"/fcfrf., 28. •"•/frf'd., 49. 

*" Early Letters, 61. *^ Ibid., 57. 

^'■Ibid., 69. "/fctd., 61. 

*^Ibtd., 69. *^Jbid., 77. 

*^ Early Letters, 43. ^'' Rem., II, 28. 
**Ibid., 68. 



9 

spondence of these years alludes to considerable reading not 
specifically mentioned. 

It would be unsafe to generalize extensively on the basis of 
this early reading. Carlyle was not yet twenty-three and he 
read books rather with the uncritical enthusiasm of a youth, 
than with the discriminating taste of a man. Nevertheless he 
was able to interpret literature later on, partly because he read 
widely in it now. The range of reading is indeed significant. 
The books that he mentions do not belong to a single class, 
nor to one literature. He read poetry and mathematics, travel, 
fiction and philosophy. He was as curious to know French 
books as English, and he eagerly went through such transla- 
tions from other languages as came in his way. His curiosity 
was as insatiable as it was far-ranging. Essential to any critic, 
broad reading was perhaps doubly essential to Carlyle, whose 
prepossessions were already beginning to turn his mind into 
more restricted, if deeper currents of thought. From the 
Kirkcaldy collection of books he was, as we have seen, more 
and more likely to select the volumes of serious literature and 
to reject novels and even poetry, except that of the masters. 
His casual comments on literature now indicate the gradual 
emergence of a deeper and more serious spirit. 

The full and free outlet for this innate earnestness was al- 
ready at hand, for Carlyle was about to begin the study of 
German. Overcome with the miseries of school teaching, 
which he says " were known long before the second Dionys- 
ius,"^^ he left Kirkcaldy for Edinburgh with vague, unformed 
ambitions. Not many months passed, however, before he had 
taken up German.^- A letter written to Mitchell from Edin- 
burgh, February 15, 1819, contains the earliest reference to 
the study of German to be found in the published writings o{ 
Carlyle. He has, he says, just now "no stated duty to per- 
form " except a little attention to mineralogy, " excepting also 
a slight tincture of German language which I am receiving 

'' Early Letters, 84. 

^" Froude's statement leaves the erroneous impression that Carlyle began 
German in the summer of 1820 while at home on the Mainhill farm (Life, 
I, 72). 



10 

from one Robert Jardine of Gottingen (or rather Applegarth), 
in return for an equally slight tincture of the French which I 
communicate."^^ Six weeks later (March 29, 1819) Carlyle 
writes to his brother : " I am still at the German ; I am able 
to read books, now, with a dictionary. At present I am read- 
ing a stupid play of Kotzebue's — but tonight I am to have 
the history of Frederick the Great from Irving. I will make 
an azufu' struggle to read a good deal of it and of the Italian 
in summer — when at home."^* Not long after, he refers to 
" reading a little of Klopstock's Messias,"^^ still under the 
tutorage of Jardine. 

Then came the two poets who kindled his enthusiasm and 
awakened a new intellectual life — Schiller and Goethe. They 
occupy so large a place in the early literary life of Carlyle, 
and Goethe alone had so profound an influence upon his spir- 
itual development that it has been easy, apparently, for stu- 
dents to misconstrue the facts concerning his first acquaint- 
ance with them. Professor Norton, who did so much val- 
uable service for Carlyle, gives the usual explanation in his 
introduction to the Goethe-Carlyle correspondence. " Per- 
plexed and baffled," he says, " begirt by doubts," Carlyle " fell 
in with Madame de Stael's famous book on Germany." From 
her " he learned to look toward Germany for a spiritual light that 
he had not found in modern French and English writers. "°" 
The first reference to Mme. de Stael's book occurs in the 
Early Lettcrs,^'^ where Carlyle writes that he has read this 
work, together with others, and where the context indi- 

^^ Early Letters, loo. 

" Regarding this mention of Italian I may add that Froude inaccurately 
says that Carlyle "had studied Italian and Spanish" (Life, I, 105), and 
" still unsatisfied, he had now fastened himself upon German ; " clearly 
placing both these languages in point of time before German. If Carlyle 
had any knowledge of Italian before he began German, it must have been 
slight ; for in the passage quoted above as well as in other passages (Early 
Letters, 110, 122), he clearly implies that he was beginning a new lan- 
guage. As for Spanish, he explicitly says that he was " learning Spanish " 
with his wife at Craigenputtock in the fall of 1828 (Letters, 129). Cf. also 
Japp, Life of De Quincey, 209. "^ Corrcsp., VIII. 

''Early Letters, iii. "57; September 25, 1817. 



11 

cates that he read it with no more definite purpose than to 
gratify a curiosity daily growing more acute. At this time 
Carlyle was not plunged in " severe spiritual wrestlings," such 
as were to trouble him some years later; and there is no sure 
suggestion that he went to Mme. de Stael for light, or that she 
directed him where to find it. Yet the book evidently made a 
strong impression, for a year and a half later, apropos of an- 
other book by the same author, he says of her that " with all 
her faults she possessed the loftiest soul of any female of her 
time."''^ In 1822, after some progress in the study of Schiller 
and Goethe, he refers to " much sublime philosophy in the 
treatises of Madame de Stael. "°^ Again in the same year he 
writes : " the Miltons, the de Stael's — these are the very salt of 
the Earth. ""^^ Of these references only the first antedates 
Carlyle's beginning of German, though the second is in the 
same letter that tells of the tutoring under Jardine."^ This 
notice of Jardine suggests that Carlyle took up German in con- 
nection with his study of mineralogy ; and a passage in a letter 
to Goethe, dated November 3, 1829, sustains this view. He 
there says : " I still remember that it was the desire to read 
Werner's Mineralogical Doctrines in the original, that first 
set me on studying German ; where truly I found a mine, far 
different from any of the Freyberg ones."*'^ ,.- / 

While it is therefore a mistake to suppose that Carlyle had 
no interest in the German poets before he began to read in 
their language (he must have read magazine articles upon 
them, in addition to Mme. de Stael's Germany), the facts show 
that he came to them when he did partly by accident, and 
certainly not with any definitely formed purpose of seeking 
" spiritual light." Nevertheless, as the concluding clause in 
the letter to Goethe tells us, German literature did come to 

^Ibid., 102. ^^Ibid., 209. 

'^ Ibid,, 230. Carlyle once thought of translating from the French a Life 
of Madame de Stael, and he refers to a proposed essay on her by Jane 
Welsh, ibid., 139, 217. 

" There is no reference to Schiller or Goethe, or to other German 
literary writers, in the Early Letters before 1819. 

'^^Correspondence, 157. For a much modified opinion on Mme. de Stael's 
Germany see essay on State of German Literature, I, 30. 



12 

Carlyle as an unlooked for revelation of spiritual truth.^^ And 
the rapturous outbursts about Schiller and Goethe in early 
letters add to the weight of this testimony. " I could tell you 
much about the New Heaven and New Earth which a slight 
study of German literature has revealed to me." " I have lived 
riotously with Schiller, Goethe and the rest; they are the 
greatest men at present with me."''* Several months later 
he was urging Miss Welsh to read these authors. " I still 
entertain a firm trust that you are to read Schiller and Goethe 
with me in October. I never met with any to relish their 
beauties; and sympathy is the very soul of life."^^ On the 
January previous Carlyle informed his brother that he had 
translated " a portion of Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' 
War and sent it off to Longmans and Company, London,"^^ 
together with proposals to translate the whole of Schiller." 
A year later he was at work on the criticism of Faust that ap- 
peared in the New Edinburgh Review for April, 1822. In 
1823-4 the Life of Schiller came out in the London Magazine, 
and before this was finished Wilhelm Meister was well under 
way."* Thus it was that Gemian unexpectedly opened Car- 
lyle's path to a literary life. It revealed to him, as he said, a 
new heaven and a new earth, and gave him a gospel to preach 
to the English people. 

But long before he had read Schiller and Goethe, Carlyle 
had literary ambitions whose beginnings now become im- 
portant in the present study. Professor Masson tells us that 
during a walk he once had with Carlyle, he received the im- 
pression that Carlyle's passion for literature " came latish " 
and that his original bent was mathematics ; but, says Profes- 
sor Masson, " I think we are entitled to assume the literary 
stratum to have been the deeper and more primitive in Car- 
lyle's constitution, and the mathematical vein to have been a 

"^ Compare 2 and 34, Goethe-Carlyle Correspondence. 

** Masson, Edinburgh Sketches, 283, letters dated August 4 and October 
22, 1820. "Masson, Edinburgh Sketches, 307. 

""Early Letters, 177. "^ Ibid., 283. 

*^ Ibid., 149. 



13 

superposition upon that."«« The early letters, however, the 
main source of facts concerning his development during these 
years, convincingly show that his deepest love was literature and 
that frequently he " could not help " exchanging " the truths 
of philosophy for the airy nothings of these sweet singers," 
as in one place he speaks of forsaking mathematics for 
Moore and ByronJ" His general reputation as a mathema- 
tician was not the reputation which he held among the few 
friends who knew him intimately. Among these his real orig- 
inality and ambitions were recognized, and he was set apart by 
them for a literary career. This is clearly shown in a letter 
from Thomas Murray in 1814. '' I have had the pleasure of 
receiving, my dear Carlyle, your very humourous and friendly 
letter, a letter remarkable for vivacity, a Shandean turn of ex- 
pression, and an affectionate pathos, which indicate a peculiar 
turn of mind, make sincerity doubly striking and wit doubly 
poignant. ... A happy flow of language either for pathos, 
description, or humour, and an easy, graceful current of ideas 
appropriate to every subject, characterize your style. This 
is not adulation; I speak what I think. Your letters will al- 
ways be a feast to me, a varied and exquisite repast ; and the 
time, I hope, will come, but I trust is far distant, when these 
our juvenile epistles will be read and probably applauded by 
a generation unborn, and that the name of Carlyle, at least, 
will be inseparably connected with the literary history of the 
nineteenth century." To which Carlyle replied: "Oh! Tom, 
what a foolish flattering creature thou art! To talk of 
future eminence in connection with the literary history of the 
nineteenth century to such a one as me ! Alas, my good lad, 
when I and all my fancies and speculations shall have been 
swept over with the besom of oblivion, the literary history of 
no century will feel itself the worse. Yet think not, because I 

^^ Edinburgh Sketches, 246-7. The facts of Carlyle's early life support 
this opinion. Mathematics consumed much of his time in college and for 
four or five years thereafter; but, as we have seen, he was strongly in- 
fluenced in his choice of this subject by the superior instruction of Leslie, 
who appears to have been the only teacher to win Carlyle. 

'" Early Letters, 73. 



14 

talk thus, I am careless of literary fame. No ! Heaven knows 
that ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of 
being known has been foremost."^^ Such was Carlyle's dream 
of a literary life, when he was not yet nineteen and had been 
scarcely a year out of college. 

Each succeeding year strengthened his determination to be- 
come a literary man. At Kirkcaldy his intimate friends, 
among whom was the romantic Margaret Gordon, regarded 
Carlyle as a young man of great promise. Stimulated by such 
companionship, he longed more and more to enter literature, 
though never without melancholy misgivings as to his fitness. 
About this time he had " forwarded to some magazine editor 
in Edinburgh what, perhaps, was a likelier little article (/. e., 
than a review of Pictet's Theory of Gravitation) (of descrip- 
tive tourist kind after a real tour by Yarrow country into An- 
nandale) which also vanished without sign."'^- When he went 
to Edinburgh in 1818, it was really to try his fortunes in litera- 
ture;'^^ though he was too keenly alive to its uncertainties to 
trust to it alone. " Mineralogy is to be my winter's work," 
he writes to Murray, on leaving Kirkcaldy. " I have thought 
of writing for booksellers. Risum teneas; for at times I am 
serious in this matter. In fine weather it does strike me that 
there are in this head some ideas, a few disjecta membra, which 
might find admittance into some of the many publications of 
the day. To live by Authorship was never my intention. ... I 
have meditated an attempt upon the profession of a lawyer or 
of a civil engineer."'^ As Carlyle thus stoutly set his face 
toward the Scottish capital in pursuit of his ideal, his pros- 
pects were indeed " not the brightest in nature,"" but he had no 
suspicion that he was about to begin his " four or five most 
miserable dark, sick, and heavy-laden years."''' 

Because of the misconception that has obtained concerning 
this critical period in Carlyle's early life, we need to keep the 
facts accurately before us. He took with him to Edinburgh 
several introductions to men likely to help him, one of which 

" Froude, Li/^, I, 29-30. ''* Early Letters, 2,7. Ci. Rem., II, 60. 

"Rem., II, 23s. ""Early Letters, 88. 

"/biU, 222. '''Rem., II, 59. 



15 

was to Dr. Brewster, editor of the Edinburgh Encyclopedia.'''^ 
A little later he secured a letter to Baillie Waugh, a bookseller 
about to start the Nezv Edinburgh ReviewJ^ The door to lit- 
erature, however, did not open at once, and he was compelled 
to take up other and dreary employments. Irving got him 
some " private teaching,"^^ which lasted scarcely more than 
two months and which was followed by mineralogy, " a mourn- 
ful study."^** " Every prospect of writing," he says in Feb- 
ruary, 1819, "up to present date, has been frustrated by my 
inability to procure books either for criticising or consulting."®^ 
In the same month came a call from Brewster to translate a 
French paper on chemistry. " Have it more than half done," 
he writes home. " Before I began it, I was busied about some 
other thing; but what will be the upshot of it I cannot say."®^ 
Nothing, indeed, came of this " other thing," though reference 
to it is evidence that Carlyle was striving for expression in his 
original way. On finishing the translation for Brewster in 
March, he says, " I wish I had plenty more of a similar kind 
to translate ; and good pay for doing \t."^^ But there was no 
more work at hand, and the future looked dark. " My pros- 
pects are so unsettled that I do not often sit down to books 
with all the zeal I am capable of. You are not to think I am 
fretful."** These words are ominous of the deep depression 
that was fast fixing itself upon Carlyle's mind, a depression 
greatly aggravated all the while by the tortures of dyspepsia. 
It was soon after this that he removed his books to Mainhill 
farm for the summer, where as Froude says, he wandered 
" about the moors like a restless spirit."*'^ 

Returning to Edinburgh in the autumn, improved in health 
and unrelaxed in purpose, he not only continued to look for 
literary work, but enrolled himself in "the class of Scots 

'"Early Letters, 91. '"Ibid., 95. 

'"Ibid., 96. ^Ibid., 102. 

^^ Ibid., 99. Carlyle's independence at this time is shown in his refusal 

to accept a tutorship because the price offered was not high enough. 
Ibid., 106. 

^'Ibid., 105. ^Ibid., no. 

'^Ibid.. 108. «' Froude, Life, I, 55. 



16 

law"'''' thus signifying his intention to attach himself to a 
stable profession. But stable professions were never to his 
taste or habits; and just as he had renounced preaching and 
teaching, he soon quit the law, finding it " a vast and thorny 
desert " where there are " uncounted cases of blockhead A 
versus blockhead B."^^ During the winter he searched for 
literary employment, and ventured an anonymous paper for 
the Edinburgh Rcvieiv. " I have not been so diligent of late," 
he tells his mother, December 29, 1819, " on account of a 
paper I am writing, which I have a design to offer for pub- 
lication. No one is aware of it, so you need not mention 
the circumstances ; but I can see well enough that to this 
point my chief efforts should be directed."®^ In March, 1820, 
he reported himself at work upon articles for Dr. Brewster's 
Encyclopedia, the first instalment of the sixteen short bio- 
graphical papers beginning with Montaigne and concluding 
with William Pitt. He sought diligently for further em- 
ployment, for translating, for any kind of literary work, but 
without success. Failing to find substantial things to do or any 
"tongue" for his deepening intellectual life, thinking, in fact, 
that all avenues were closed against him, Carlyle's mind became 
a prey to gloom and despondency. " The thought that one's 
best days are hurrying darkly and uselessly away is yet more 
grievous [i. e., than solitude]. It is vain to deny it, I am alto- 
gether an unprofitable creature. Timid, yet not humble, weak, 
yet enthusiastic ; nature and education have rendered me en- 
tirely unfit to force my way among the thick-skinned inhabi- 
tants of this planet."®" This account of his mental condition is 
followed a few days later by a letter to his brother Aleck, in 
which he says that he could enjoy the coming of summer if he 

'" £(ir/.v Letters, 119. "Ibid., 144. 

"^ Ibid., 125. A long letter of advice from Irving to Carlyle (see Froude, 
Life, I, 59) may have been influential in connection with this first effort 
to gain admission into the pages of the Edinburgh Review, Froude's 
comment is that " Carlyle was less eager to give his thoughts ' tongue ' 
that Irving supposed " (ibid., 62). But the letters of this period show that 
Irving was correct in regarding Carlyle's mind as made up to earn his 
living by writing. For Carlyle's allusion to this paper see Early Letters, 
127, and Rem., II, 233. ^^ Early Letters, 134-5. 



17 

had " some stated job to work to keep " him in employment and 
to drive away the " vidtures of the mind."'''* Thus another 
winter of " successive fits of activity and low-spirits ""^ wore 
away, and Carlylc again took down to Mainhill the little work 
he had to do. 

During the following winter (1820-21) his despair dropped 
to its nadir, and the pictures that he drew of himself became 
painfully vivid. Not until close upon spring was there a single 
prospect of additional work, and meanwhile his misery of mind 
and body made him desperate. " I get low, very low in spirits," 
he says, " when the clay-house is out of repair." " If you saw 
me sitting here," he writes to his brother, " with my lean and 
sallow visage, you would wonder how those long bloodless bony 
fingers could be made to move at all."**" A gleam of light 
breaks in now and then, for in the same letter we read of 
cheering projects for writing and translating (probably from 
Schiller). Most of the time, however, the clouds were thick 
and black. Tortured with bodily pain and without work, Car- 
lyle now experienced a loneliness unfelt before. " To-night," 
he writes again to his brother (January 2, 1821), " I am alone 
in this cold city — alone to cut my way into the heart of its 
benefices by the weapons of my own small quiver.""'* 

These livid flashes from the clouded correspondence of this 
period show how stubbornly Carlyle held to his purpose to 
succeed in literature."* Deep in his nature was a conscious- 
ness of superior worth and power. " I know there is within 
me something different from the vulgar herd of mortals; I 
think it is something superior; and if once I had overpassed 
these bogs and brakes and quagmires, that lie between me and 
the free arena, I shall make some fellows stand to the right 
and left— or I mistake me greatly. ""° A few weeks later, i. e., 
March 18, 1821, he relates his fortunes to Mitchell: "I have 
tried about twenty plans this winter in the way of authorship ; 

""Ibid., 137. "'Ibid., 149, i53- 

"^Ibid., 140. ""Ibid., 149. Cf. iS3, i73- 

" " If a man taste the magic cup of literature, he must drink of it 

forever, though bitter ingredients enough be mixed with the liquor." 

Ibid., 171. 

"'^ Ibid., 15s; to Aleck in February. 



18 

tlicy have all failed ; I have about twenty more to try ; and // it 
does but please the Director of all things to continue the mod- 
erate share of health now restored to me, I will make the doors 
of human society fly open before me yet, notwithstanding my 
petards will not burst, or make only noise when they do; I 
must mix them better, plant them more judiciously; they shall 
burst and do execution too.""" Ikit opportunity for literary 
employment had already brightened the future and had caused 
him to write cheerfully to his father : " Matters have a more 
promising appearance with me at the present date than they 
have had for a long season.""^ Waugh had sent him Joanna 
Baillie's Metrical Legends to review, a task which he executed 
in the form of an article printed in the New Edinburgh Review 
for October of this year (1821). At the end of May Irving 
took Carlyle for rest and recreation upon a trip to Haddington, 
where he first met Jane Welsh. " Those three or four days," 
he says, " were the beginning of a new life to mc.""^ 

Thus the storm-clouds blew over and thus happily ended 
what has correctly been called the darkest period of Carlyle's 
life. It is in this period that Froude placed the spiritual con- 
flict, the " Raphometic fire-baptism" described in Sartor. The 
biographer says that " the doubts which had slopped Carlyle's 
divinity career were blackening into thunderclouds,""" and 
that he was passing through the struggle " \\hich is always 
hardest in the noblest minds, which Job had known, and David, 
and Solomon, and ^iLschylus, and Shakespeare, and Goethe."^"" 
Other biographers, probably echoing Froude, have likened 
this spiritual revolution to the sudden illumination of PituP"^ 
and of Constantine.'*'- They refer to the Everlasting No of 
Sartor, as the authentic record of Carlyle's mental changes at 
this time ; and Froude expressly refers to " the spiritual mal- 
adies which were the real cause of his distraction."^**^ But 
the published letters of Carlyle written at this period have no 
references to such profound spiritual unrest as is thus afc- 

'^Ibid., 160. ''"Ibid., 54. 

"'Ibid.. 156. "" Garnet, Life, 25. 

"^Rein., II, 87. Cf. Early Lcltcrs, 169. '"^ Nichol, Life, 32. 

"''Life, I, SI. '"^Life, I, 81. 



19 

tributed to him ; while they do refer frequently to bodily ail- 
ments and to failure to find the right work. It is true that his 
mind was changing, that he was steadily moving away from 
the faith of his fathers, and that Schiller and Goethe were 
revealing a new heaven and a new earth. In Carlyle intellec- 
tual advance was inevitable. But it is a mistake to fix upon 
this period as the crisis of the revolution and to maintain that 
the chief cause, or any really determining cause, of his distress 
was a questioning of the truth of revelation or of the existence 
of a moral Providence in the universe. 1°* Long before this 
time, Gibbon had torn from his mind " the last remnant " of 
his "orthodox belief in miracles"; ^"° and in 1817 he had sev- 
ered his " last feeble tatter of connection with Divinity Hall," 
because at that time he " was indifferent on that head."^^* 
The truth seems to be that lack of work, failure to advance 
toward the goal of his deepest ambitions and to find expression 
for the surging life within, were the main sources of Carlyle's 
harrowing discontent. And the unbroken progress of the next 
few years add to the evidence that his religious life underwent 
no convulsive transformation. 

Though no new task awaited him on his return to Edinburgh 
from Haddington, he resumed the old (probably the article on 
the Legends for Waugh and more biographies for Brewster) 
with a zeal that betokened new hope. " Within the last three 
weeks," he writes in August, " I have written almost as much 

"" Froude, Life, I, 54. "= Masson, Edinburgh Sketches, 263 

"" R<^m., II, 39 ; cf. ibid., 90. The conversion sketched in Sartor Car- 
lyle says is " symbolical myth all," with nothing literally true except " the 
incident in Rue St. Thomas de I'Enfer " (Froude, Life, I, 81). By "sym- 
bolical myth," I understand Carlyle to mean that the spiritual conflict there 
described is symbolic of the struggle that all inquiring minds have to en- 
dure at some period of their growth, and that he himself passed through 
in the general course of his early manhood. But conversion in the Pauline 
sense of change of religious belief, as Froude and others seem to infer, 
there was. none at this time ; and if there were any such it came at a 
later period in the manner described in the Reminiscences (II, 179), The 
incident in Leith Walk was a struggle of will, not of belief — a moral 
wrestle with himself as to whether he would continue the fight to make a 
living by literature in spite of the nearly overwhelming defeats of the 
past months. 



20 

as I had written before in the whole course of my natural 
life."^'*'^ " Nervous and spiritless " times there were, as there 
would always be for Carlyle ; but on the whole the succeeding 
months were passed in joyous industry. In November (1821) 
Brewster gave him Lcgendre's Elements of geometry and 
trigonometry to translate, a " canny job " when it was begun, 
but " thrice wearisome " when nearly finished. Of this task 
which brought him fifty pounds^"^ he writes: "I have set 
fairly to work, and am proceeding lustily ; not in the whimper- 
ing, wavering, feeble, hobbling style I used ; but stoutly."^"^ 
With the new year (1822) through the friendly help of Irving 
who was now in London, Carlyle obtained the tutorship of 
Charles Buller's two sons at a salary of two hundred pounds.^^*^ 
He liked the BuUers and continued his teaching for more than 
two years, finding it " a pleasure rather than a task " ; the more 
more so since it afforded him much time for his literary pro- 
jects, now multiplying encouragingly. He refused an ofl^er to 
edit a Dundee newspaper at one hundred pounds a year, and 
accepted from Waugh a commission to write a paper on Faust. 
He had good reason, therefore, to write ; " full of business 
even to overflowing, with projects of all sorts before me, and 
some few rational hopes of executing a definite portion of 
them, I feel very contented in my usual state. "^^^ 

But contentment for Carlyle was never of long duration, 
and he was the last man to rest satisfied with the hackwork he 
was now doing. An unrest settled upon him, the unrest of an 
original mind conscious of its powers but conscious also of its 
unf ruitfulness. For months he had been " riddling creation " 
for a congenial subject. Back in December, 1821, while work- 
ing upon Legendre, he wrote home : " The evenings I design 
to devote to original composition, if I could but gather my- 
self ."^^^ In the next February he said : " I designed to set 
about writing some Book shortly; and this (at which I must 
ultimately arrive, if I ever arrive at anything) will of necessity 

^'''' Early Letters, 174. '"''Early Letters, 186. 

">^Rem., II, 106. "Ubid., 190. 

'" Ibid., 206. Cf. 207. " I have plenty of ofifers from Booksellers." 
""Ibid.. 186. 



21 

require to be postponed greatly."^^^ " It seems quite indispen- 
sable," he told Jane Welsh in May, " that I should make an 
effort soon; I shall have no settled peace of mind till then."^^* 
More sig-nificant are the words to his mother some weeks later : 
" I have also books to write and things to say and do in this 
world which few wot of. This has an air of vanity; but it is 
not altogether so; I consider that my Almighty Author has 
given me some glimmerings of superior understanding and 
mental gifts; and I should reckon it the worst treason against 
Him to neglect improving and using to the very utmost of my 
power these His beautiful mercies. "^^° 

In a study of Carlyle as a critic the character of this first 
proposed composition has considerable importance, since it dis- 
closes the direction of his originality. Earliest projected and 
longest deliberated was a book on a " historico-biograph- 
ical"^^" theme, for which he began reading early in 1822,^^^ 
and which he outlined several months later in a letter to Miss 
Welsh : " Four months ago," he wrote, " I had a splendid 
plan of treating the history of England during the Common- 
wealth in a new style — not by way of regular narrative — for 
which I felt too well my inequality, but by grouping together 
the most singular manifestations of mind that occurred then 
under distinct heads — selecting some remarkable person as the 
representative of each class, and trying to explain and illus- 
trate their excellencies and defects, all that was curious in their 
fortunes as individuals, or in their formation as members of 
the human family, by the most striking methods I could devise. 
Already my characters were fixed upon — Laud, Fox, Clarendon, 
Cromwell, Milton, Hampden; already I was busied in the 
study of their works ; when that wretched Philomath with his 
sines and tangents came to put me in mind of a prior engage- 
ment."^^^ This passage reveals the same essential character- 
istics in the man of twenty-seven that we find in the man who 
at sixty-three published his first instalment of the life of Fred- 
erick the Great. Unhappily withdrawn from his plans by the 

"^Jbid., 202. ""Ibid., 217. 

"*Ibid., 217. "''Note-Books, 23-29. 

^"Ibid., 223. "^ Early Letters, 260. 



22 

call from I'iousUt for I .ci^^i'iuhi', CarlyU- Iiad, ucvi-rllicloss, no 
hope of riiulint;- " compk'to ri'sl," until " fairly ovorluad in llic 
C()niposilion of st)nic I'aluahlc nook.""" llis loUcrs lo JMiss 
Wi'Ish (Inrini;- this period I'onslanlly refer to literary hopes and 
aims, all i'''i wliii-li weie destined to he frnstrali-d lor a loni;' 
lime to eome. C )ne of his schemes, however, deserves special 
mention, since it strengthens the impression which we g'ct 
from the pieci-dinj;- acconnt <d" the ahandoned hioi^raphies. 
" Next 1 thon.i;ht of some work of imai;inati(Mi : I wonld paint, 
in hrief hnt vivid manner, the old story of a noble mind strup^- 
}^lini;- against an ij;nol)le fate; some liery yet henit;nant spirit 
reachinj;- forth to catch the brit^ht creation of his own fancy, 
and hn-akini;" his heati aqainst the vnlj;ar obstacles of this 
lowt-r woild. r>nt then what knew 1 o\ this lower world? 
The nian mnsl be a hero, and 1 conld only draw the materials 
of him for myself. Kich sonices oi snch materials! besides, 
it wH're wi"ll that he died o\ love ; and yonr novel-love is become 
a perfect ih n<4 ; anil of the ijcnnine sort 1 conUl not inulertakc 
to say a woid."'"" 

l'\irtnnatel\ for the world and for C"ai"lyle, he was oblii^cil 
to i;ive up his schenu" o\ novel-writinj;' in {\\\o\- o\ other tasks 
now rapiilly acciunulalinj;-. Irving" opened the way in the 
London Mai^aciiir for a life of ."^chiller; and alnn^st at the 
same time (early in iSj,0 "' ln>yd the pursy j>ookseller" 
wishcil him io " translate (ioiihe's W'iUiclm Mristi-r," which he 
had toUl r.oyd was "very clever."''' r>ut these encouraging 
pros[H-cts, loqetlur with the Hnller tutorship, served in the end 
oidv to intensify his restlessness and to precipitate a secoud, 
tlu)Ui;h a shiMter peii<>d of despair. It was tu>w " the accursed 
hag" ilvsiH^psia rather than the want of ctni_i;enial literary oc- 
cupation that bi\nij;ht I'ailyle to the brink of suicide. Com- 
position, luarK always a liariowing toil with him, becatue a 
kind of nij;ht mare.'" In the midst oi snch distresses the year 

""Jbiii., J.?s. '" IblJ.. .'00. 

'"//..•,/.. j6i. 

"" " I sit ilown to it (i. <\, Mcistrr) witl> tlio ferocity of a hyena" (ibid.. 
-'8.}'). •• 1 coiilil ticiiiu'Ully swoav tliat I ;un tin* ii^ioatost dtitu-o in creation; 
the ciioUii\o, 111 .1 iiai;iKvaiil) is lillle luMler ih.iu the l.iluif of a (.uiKliuakcr ; 
I swell .\iul loll aiul keep tedious viL-il, an.l .it Uui'.lh there riuiii out from 
llie tovlmeil im lliiii.; jiot an \\\\.\oi ol soliil iH-wier " (ibid., 269), 



23 

wore on. and the first and second parts of Schiller were fin- 
ished, while not long after (/. c, January. 1824) came from 
the r>oiuIon Tiiiu-s "(he //r,s7 puhlic uoA oi api)a)val " he had 
ever had.'-' The last of Schiller was soon oil his hands, fol- 
Icnvcd speedily hy the Mristi'i: With a draft of one hnmlred 
eii;hfy poinuls (the payment for Mristi-r) aiul a letter of intri>- 
tlnction to Thomas Camiihell. I'arlyle sailed, Jnne 5, 1824. 
from lulinhnri^h for London to join the llnllers. 

This first London visit did not fill him with respect for his 
fellow-craftsmen, nor diil it much improve his chances for snc- 
cess in literatnre. Irving- introduced him [o manv of the liter- 
ary celehrities. inclndinj;- Ciderid^v, the " faltish old man " on 
Iiij;hi;ate llill. who nunnbled mysteries about "Kant and 
Co."'-'* The first letter from (aiethe came at this time, and 
Carlyle received it with a mixture of sentiment and humor: 
"Almost like a message from I'airy Land." he tells Miss 
Welsh/'-'' " I was very glad (o hear from the old blade, in 
so kind though so brief a fashion." he tells his brother Aleck.'-" 
Ihit these llattering attentions did not mean soliil pudding and 
a start on the right road. The Schiller, gathered into book- 
form, was published in the late winter oi 1825 and brought 
ninety poumls ami great disgust to its author, expressed in 
his refus.d to attach his n;mie to the bcxik and in his willing- 
ness after he was paid, to "let the thing lie and rot till the 
day ot Doom."'-^ To disgust was aiUleil momentarv wrath 
when " a luckless wight of an opium-eater," De Ouincey, 
" wrote a very vulgar and brutish Review of Mcisti'r."^"'' By 

'-' Kt-jii.. 11. 114. •• 1 am very \vi;iU," he wrolo in liis notc-i)ouI< ; "it Ivcpt 
luc chccrlul for an hour" {Nolc-Books, 61). How welcome was this 
ray of light may be jiidt-cd from a passage in (he note-book written a few 
days before the one just .luoted. •' My eourse seems deeper and !)lacker 
than that of any man; to be ' immtued in a rotten earcass,' every avenue 
of which is changed into an inlet of pain; till my intellect is obscured and 
weakened, and my head and heart are alike desolate ;iud d.irk. How have 
1 deserved this?" (\'ol<--lU'oks. 56.) 

'■■"See original sketch of Coleridge, Froudo, Life, I, 170. Others whom 
he met were Campbell, Crabb Robinson, Barry Cornwall. 

'"-^luirly I.rttcrs. 31S, '" JbiJ.. JJ4. 

""Ibid., 322. ''■'Ibid., 323. 



24 

spring, therefore, Carlyle longed to leave London. " I desire 
to be ivorking honestly in my day and generation in this busi- 
ness which has now become my trade. I make no grain of 
doubt that in time I shall penetrate the fence that keeps me 
back, and find the place which is due to me among my fellow- 
men. We shall see : I am not at all in a hurry ; the time will 
come."^-" 

The time was almost at hand. During the succeeding 
period at Hoddam Hill (the summer of 1825), "perhaps the 
most triumphantly important of my life,""** Carlyle was not 
only busy translating his Specimens of German Romance (for 
which he had contracted before leaving London) ; but he was 
also again feverishly eager to produce an original work. 
*'Alas! the matter lies deep and crude, if it Hes at all, within 
my soul ; and much unwearied study will be called for before 
I can shape it into form. Yet out it shall come, by all the 
powers of Dulness.""^ The project of a literary newspaper"^ 
and a proposal to secure the editorship of the Scots' Maga- 
zine — left a wreck from the failure of the Ballantynes — were 
alike rejected. In tlie autumn of 1826 he married Jane Welsh 
and removed to Edinburgh, where the spectres of unrest still 
haunted him and the wish to begin " some book of my own " 
became a kind of demonic possession.^^^ He did in fact start 
a novel, the plan of which he had sketched four or five years 
previously. " Heaven only knows what it will turn to ; but I have 
sworn to finish it," he wrote."* But IVotton Reinfred (such 
was the book's name), though daily on the anvil, refused to be 
hammered into right shape and had to be set aside for a '" new 
enterprise. "^-'^ This came as the result of a visit to Jeffrey. 
From Barry Cornwall Carlyle had obtained a letter of introduc- 
tion to the great man, who received him " in his kindest 
style,"^^^ offered to introduce him to Scott, and " spoke about 
writing in his Review."^^'^ Carlyle asked Jeffrey to read the 

^^ Ibid., 326. '" Early Letters, 339. 

^^Rem., II, 179- '^"^ Ibid., 343. 

"'^ For various schemes of original writing see Note-Books, 77-80, and 
1 19-120. ^^^ Ibid., 22. 

"* Letters, 20. "' Ibid,, 23. 

''''Ibid., 46. 



25 

German Romance first, to see what manner of man he was, 
after which he would call again. Some months later accord- 
ingly he did call. "Where is the Article? seemed to be the 
gist of Jeffrey's talk to me ; for he was to all appearance an- 
xious that I would undertake the task of Germanizing the 
public — so I did not treat the whole Earth not yet Germanized 
as a * parcel of blockheads ' ; which surely seemed a fair 
enough request. Two days after, having revolved the thing, 
I met him again, with the notice that I would ' undertake.' 
The next number of the Revieiv, it appeared, was actually in 
the press, and to be printed off before the end of June ; so that 
no large Article could find place there, till the succeeding 
quarter. However, I engaged, as it were for paving the way, 
to give him in this present publication some little short paper ; 
I think on the subject of Jean Paul, though that is not quite 
settled with myself yet."^^^ Recalling tliis circumstance many 
years later, Carlyle had this to say of it : " I was now in a 
sort fairly launched upon Literature ; and had even, to sec- 
tions of the public, become a ' Mystic School ' ; — not quite 
prematurely, being now the age of thirty-two, and having had 
my bits of experience, and gotten something which I wished 

much to say, — and have ever since been saying, the best way 
I could."^39' 

'^^Ibid., 46. ^^"Rem., II, 237. 



CHAPTER II 
Ideals of Literature 

Our study of Carlyle's early life, with especial reference to 
his efforts to enter the field of literature, has brought to light 
certain important prepossessions. Environment, education, and 
early struggles combined to develop a Scottish nature hardly 
matched in its union of intellectual power with moral intensity. 
To whatever task he turned, Carlyle was almost sure to bring 
to the execution of it an earnestness so vehement as to deter- 
mine the direction of his intellectual energies. He loved litera- 
ture from the first and he read it widely and insatiably; but 
his liking for the literature of plcasnre soon gave place to a 
preference which in later days amounted to a prejudice for 
the literature of edification. It was the consuming ambition 
of his early manhood to write an original work, which was 
certain to be ethical in its purpose, whether it took the form of 
novel, verse or essay. This original bias of mind deeply in- 
fluenced Carlyle's literary and critical ideals. He always 
favored literature that carried with it an ethical or a spiritual 
content, and he was likely to be deficient in sympathy with 
a man or a book that did not arouse his moral nature. 

It was more from necessity than from deliberate intention 
that Carlyle became for a period of years a critic of literature. 
By long meditation and by intense study of German literature 
and philosophy, he had formulated a gospel which he wished 
to preach to the English people. Had he been free to choose 
his own time and method, undoubtedly Carlyle would not have 
selected the review article, or the critical essay, as the medium 
of his message. Necessity left him no alternative. But into 
compositions which were written to meet the needs of the 
hour, he poured so much of his heart and mind that they have 
survived to this day with scarcely diminished vitality and re- 
main as a notable achievement in English literary criticism. 
The message that he learned from literature and philosophy he 

26 



27 

communicated in the form of a philosophical criticism of litera- 
ture. In all of his essays, therefore, from first to last, there 
will be found a consistent body of literary and critical doc- 
trine, which received an emphasis varying with the time when 
it was expressed and with the author to whom it was applied. 
It is the purpose of the present study to expound this doctrine, 
or body of literary and critical ideals. We shall first consider 
their nature and source, and their relation to contemporary 
criticism. We shall next show how these ideals determined 
Carlyle's attitude toward the literature of romanticism. These 
larger and more general aspects of the subject will be followed 
by some account of Carlyle's place as an introducer of German 
literature into England and by an exposition of five or six of 
his greater essays to show how he applied his principles to the 
interpretation of individual authors. Finally, we shall point 
out his change from criticism to prophecy and shall have a 
brief word to say concerning his strength and weakness as a 
critic of literature. 

Carlyle once declared that " all real ' Art ' is definable as 
Fact, or say as the disimprisoned ' Soul of Fact.' "^ Though 
he made this declaration in 1867, it expresses a faith which 
he held from the beginning of his literary career. Fact is 
synonymous with truth, or, as he says in Sartor, it is eternity 
looking through time. It is the function of art to reveal this 
truth. " We cannot but believe," says Carlyle, " that there is 
an inward and essential Truth in Art ; a Truth far deeper than 
the dictates of mere Mode, and which, could we pierce tlirough 
these dictates, would be true for all nations and all men. To 
arrive at this Truth, distant from every one at first, approach- 
able by most, attainable by some small number, is the end and 
aim of all real study of Poetry."- All poetry, or literature 

* Essays, VII, 220. 

'Essays, I, 199. In Carlyle's essays the word art is used in three senses. 
First, as in the above passages, it means organized truth, seen and shaped 
m the mind's deepest recesses ; this is the usual meaning (Essays, II, 24 ; 
IV, 123). Secondly, it is used as synonymous with form, as referring to 
what are called " literary merits and demerits : " this use is not infrequent 
in the earlier essays {Essays, IV, 47). Thirdly, art is used to mean fine 
art, sculpture, music, or poetry ; this use is rare even in the earlier essays 
{Essays, II, 275). 



28 

(till' liTins an- sMioiiyinous in ("arlylc), is an apocalypse of 
man and of iialurc-. " It may wnll cmioii<^1i be named, in 
l<"iclitc's style, a 'contimions revelation' of the Godlike in the 
Terrestrial and Common." Poetry is thus identilied with 
philosophy, with wisdom, with religion, lis aim is to incor- 
porate "the everlasting" Reason of man in forms visible to his 
Sense." 'Hie trne poet is both a philosopher and a seer. 
Goethe is not a meie poet and sweet singer, but a " Moralist 
and riiiloso])her." In Kichter " IMiilosophy and I\:)etry are 
blended." Novalis is philosopher as well as poet, because he 
strives [o vvvva\ the iinsien. I'or a contrary reason Voltaire 
is only "a popular sweel Singer and 1 laranguer.""' lUit 
wliether Carlyle calls the literary artist a poet or a philosopher, 
he invariably thinks of him as a seer and not as a maker of 
abstract systems of thought. I'~ven when he goes so far in 
his essay on (ii-nnan pla\vvrighls as to declare that "a consis- 
tent philosophy of Wiv is the soul and essence of all poetry," 
he means only that the poii sliould consistently and habitually 
(U'al with ri'alilii's, not with fancies, with what has been lived, 
not with what has been dreamed. Literature is concerned 
witli Irnlh.' 

"Jli-iOi-s, 151 ; I'ss.iys. 1. jji ; II, .).) ; T, 198; III, 4; II, 162. 

* Essays, il, m.|. Tin- iiR'aninn of tlie word reality in Carlylo, or its 
e(|uivali'iil, siioli ;is trulii, fact, art, lifi- sooms to shift .somewhat as his 
iiitcrt'st: oIiatiKOS from liti'ralmo .niil ciilicisiii ti> liiof-rapliy and prophecy. 
Ill (he carlii-r issays Ihosi- (cnus Ki''"''ally liavc an cx.ict rcfcii'iicc to 
llu' (icrman critical philosophy and mean sonu-lhini; (r.-iiisccndcntal, wliile 
ill lilt' lalcr OIK'S reality scorns to mean only wh.il has hccn lit'i'd, that is, 
truth whicli lias passed lhrou);li human experience. Itnt even this C'adylc 
re^;;lrds as transcendental in the .general sense. 

The identil'icalion of iioelry and philosophy was common among the 
rom.antic writers holh in (iiruiany and I'liiKlaiul. It was the aim every- 
where to make poetry synonymous with life in its totality, the essence of 
social, ethical, reliKioiis and philosophical thought. To this effect Professor 
Boyesen quotes from I'riedrich Schleiiel's manifesto in the second number 
of The ytthrntruiii, the or^an of the Romantic School in Germany. (Essays 
on (7i'n)ton Literature, 280.) Tlu' writings of Richtcr and Novalis are full 
of this notion. The criticism of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Haz^tt fre- 
quently includes it {W'ordsu-orth's Literary Critieisiii, cd. Nicol, 25, 27, 165, 
171; Coleridf^e's Literary Criticism, ed. Mackail, 173, 183; Hazlitt, IVorhs, 
V, Ott Poetry in Ceiieral, f^assiin, esp. 2, 6). It is in DcQuincey and 
Shelley. See also 1 lei ford's . I.i;.- 0/ /TonZ-wor///, Intro.. XV. 



29 

Carlylc somotiiiics idcMilifies this truth in art witli beauty, 
l)ut not l)v ciitoriii};- the mazes of jcsthetic theory as do Schiller 
and doclhc,'^ nor by bclievinjij, with Keats that "what the 
iinaL;ination seizes as Beauty must be Truth."" To delicately 
spun systems or formulas he was o])()()se(l. And we cannot 
think of him as seeking truth in art through the senses. 
Truth comes to us intuitively, by a synthesis of the reason. It 
is, as Wordsworth also held, a product of llie creative imagina- 
tion. This higher truth, originating from within, Carlyle often 
S])eaks of as beauty. We fmd him referring to a " universal 
and eternal Keauty," and defining taste as a "sense to discern 
and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness."^ 
Criticism, he says, pretends to "clear our sense" to discern 
" Eternal Jicauty." Under the inlluence of Goethe's poetry, 
the world once more has become a solemn temple " where 
the spirit of P>eauty still dwells."'^ The open secret is no longer 
a secret to the poet; he knows that the universe is full of good- 
ness and that " whatever has being has beauty." A " wizard 
beauty," Carlyle says, dwells in the fragments of Novalis, but 
in the art of Hoffmann there is none." Whereever it is named, 
beauty is thought of as the creation, not of a mind working 
from without among sensations, but of one working from 
within among ideas. I'eauty is therefore indistinguishable 
from transcendental truth and has the same spiritual value.'" 

It is an integral part of this doctrine that poetry and prose 
are the same, and that meter is an ornament not a necessity of 
poetry.^ ^ Carlyle is not deaf to the melody and harmony in 

'^Note-Books, 36-41. ''Essays, I, 34; cf. ibid., 47. 

"Keats, Works, IV, 46. '^ Essays, I, 44, 55- 

"Essays, I, igs, 230, 260; III, 162. 

'"Carlyle is a mystic in his use of such concepts as truth, hoauly, good- 
ness. In the earlier essays these terms are used interchanKcnhly, and llic 
soul of the universe is at once good and beautiful and true. Laler and 
especially when the word beauty seemed to suggest dilettantism and fine 
arts, he generally employed the term truth (or reality) alone. Another 
instance of his mysticism is in his treatment of poetry as " musical 
thought " (Heroes, 77 ; cf. also the phrase " Music of the Universe," 
Essays, IV, 183). Shakespeare "is a Voice coming to us from the Land of 
Melody" (Essays, I, 212; cf. Shelley's phrase "Eternal music," Defense 
of Poetry, 9). '^Essays, II, 107. 



30 

the song of the poet (no critic has given higher or juster 
praise to the songs of Burns), but he thinks that the music 
comes from an expression of " Musical Thought."^^ He does 
not attribute it to the poet's mastery of measured language. 
In but a single instance does he use the name poetry when 
referring to Scott's poems. ^^ He usually speaks of them as 
rhymed or metrical romances and of Scott as a song-singer; 
making it appear on all sides that he does not consider Scott a 
poet in the sense in which the word is used in his criticism. 
Voltaire, the representative poet of the eightcendi century 
in France, is not a poet but a prosaist.^* The dramas of Grill- 
parzer, though written in verse, are not poetry ; and Grillparzer 
is not a dramatist, but only a playwright who " writes in 
prose. "^^ Writing that fails to carry truth to the reader is 
not poetry, whatever its form. Writing that conveys truth 
is poetry, whether its language is metrical or unmetrical. Car- 
lyle therefore regards Goethe's IVilhch)! Mcistcr and Boswell's 
Life of Johnson as poetry.^*^ Richter, who wrote no verse, 
is yet a " Poct."^'^ The " prose fictions " of Novalis arc poetry, 
and passages from HcinricJi von Oftcrdingcn illustrate him 
" in his character of Poet."^^ The true artist may use what 
speech he will ; but his position as poet is determined by the 
worth of his message.^" 

The theory that the sole function of poetry is to reveal truth 
or beauty carries with it the notion that the poet is a seer. 

"Heroes, 77-7^- ^^ Essays, VI, 55. 

"The discussion in Essays, II, 167-170 is really not an exception to 
this assertion. ^'Essays, II, 91; cf. II, 107. 

^"Essays, I, 194-6; IV, 78, 81, 109. 

" Essays, III, 59 ; cf. Heine : " Jean Paul ist ein grosser Dichter und 
Philosoph " {IVerke, V, 330). ^^ Essays, II, 220. 

" In the deliverance of his message, that is, in the choice of his material, 
the poet is not limited to one class of subjects or persons. Reality may be 
found in the meanest places or among the humblest people. The essay on 
Burns may be regarded from one point of view as a defense (against the 
apologists of the school of Jeffrey) of humble material as proper for 
poetic treatment {Essays, II, 13-15; I, 17). 

Carlyle's doctrine implies all along that true literature is serious and 
that the literature of amusement is not literature in the legitimate sense 
{Essays, I, 47, 282; II, 98, 142, 184; III, 89; VI, 70). 



31 



This notion fills so large a place in Carlyle's literary creed that 
we must discuss it here, even though it was touched upon in a 
previous paragraph. A seer is an artist with the gift of 
vision, an artist, as Carlyle says in Goethe, " in the high and 
ancient meaning; in the meaning which it may have borne 
long ago among the masters of Italian painting, and the 
fathers of Poetry in England; [in whom] we trace some 
touches of that old, divine Spirit.'"^« "The true Poet," he 
says again, "is ever, as of old, the Seer; whose eye has been 
gifted to discern the godlike Mystery of God's Universe, and 
decipher some new lines of its celestial writing; we can still 
call him a Vates and Seer ; for he sees into this greatest of 
secrets, 'the open secret'; hidden things become clear; how 
the Future (both resting on Eternity) is but another phasis of 
the Present: thereby are his words in very truth prophetic; 
what he has spoken shall be done."^^ Like the poet, the man 
of letters also is a revealer of inner and essential truth, and 
Carlyle applies to him Fichte's characterization : " Men of 
letters are a perpetual Priesthood, from age to age, teaching 
all men that a God is still present in this life ; that all ' appear- 
ance,' whatsoever we see in the world, is but a vesture for the 
' Divine Idea of the World,' for that which ' lies at the bottom 
of appearancc.'"^^ This power to see truth furnishes the 
criterion by which Carlyle estimates the worth and rank of 
every writer whom he seriously considers, from Musseus to 

Scott. 

This faculty of vision, as Carlyle conceives it, is the supreme 
gift. It means, in the first place, that its possessor is a thinker, 
not a dreamer. " At bottom, it is the Poet's first gift," he says, 
" as it is all men's, that he have intellect enough."-' " True 

"" Essays, I, i8o. -'Essays, IV, 44- 

-^Heroes, 145. Cf. the discussion on poets and poetry in Wot ton Rem- 
fred, Last' Words, 128-145. This lofty idea of the poet's nature and 
office was common to early romanticism, especially in Germany. Professor 
Boyesen says: "This exaltation of the poet above the rest of his kind, 
this assumption of the office of a prophet, priest and inspired seer, and the 
kindred claims to exemption from the rules of morals which govern 
ordinary men, are dominant features in the Romantic School." Essays 
on Ger. Lit., 328. "■'Heroes, 97. 



32 

poetry is always the quintessence of general mental riches, the 
purilicd result of strong thought and conception, and of refined 
as well as powerful emotion."-'' He calls particular attention 
to Shakespeare's " superiority of Intellect." and to Goethe's 
"all-piercing faculty of Vision."-'^ By intellect Carlyle did not 
mean, as did inan\- I'.iigiish critics of his day, some individual 
faculty or power working as it were in isolation to produce a 
pretty fancy or sentiment. lie meant the entire mind, as a 
single intellectual force, with all its faculties acting in concert 
to create artistic wholes. Goethe's poetry, he says, is the voice 
of the whole harmonious manhootl.-" When he speaks of mor- 
ality ill a poet, or of moral purpose in a poem, therefore, Car- 
lyle is never thinking of something iletached and apart. Art is 
moral because intellect and morality are indistinguishable in 
the sound miiul.-' Art is indeed the creation of the poet's 
whole mind in its moments of clearest vision, but it is at pre- 
cisely those moments that the mind is most moral. -'^ 

This facull}- of insight, or vision, means in the second place, 
that the poet or thinker works by processes m}sterious and 
incommunicable. Carlyle's notion of artistic creation is care- 
fully foniiulated and harmonizes with his entire philosophical 
theory of poetry. The best and fullest statement of it occurs 
^in the essay called Cliaractcristics: 

" Of our Thinlvinp," he declares, " we might say, it is but tlie mere upper 
surface that we shape into articulate Thoughts ; — underneath the region of 
argument and conscious discourse, lies the region of meditation ; here, in 
its quiet mysterious depths, dwells what vital force is in us; here, if 
aught is to be created, and not merely manufactured and communicated, 
must the work go on. Manufacture is intelligible, but trivial ; Creation is 
great, and cannot be understood. Thus if the Debator and Demonstrator, 
whom we may rank as the lowest of true thinkers, knows what he has 
done, and how he did it, the Artist, whom we rank as the highest: 
knows not ; nuist speak of Inspiration, and in one or the other dialect, 
call his work the gift of a divinity."-'^' 

'*Lifc of Schiller, 169. -' F{ crocs. 98; Essays, IV, i;S. 

'^Essays, I, 180; II, 18; Heroes, 98, 73. 

^ Life of Schiller, 171; Heroes, 41, 09; Lectures on the History of 
Literature. 150. 

'^Essays. I, 56. iSo: II, 19. 51 : IV, .'o, 48. 
''Essays. IV, 4. 



33 

To this clear and stroiii;- declaration we need supply but a 
single comment. We may add that the distinction made be- 
tween manufacture and creation is fundamental in Carlyle's 
criticism underlying all that he has to say concerning the dif- 
ference between the prosaist and the poet. In the essay on 
German playwrights for example, he again and again distin- 
guishes the dramatist who is a creator, and therefore a poet, 
from the playwright who is a manufacturer, a mechanician, and 
therefore a prosaist.''" The same standards are applied to Vol- 
taire, whose world is called prosaic and whose order is not 
" Beauty, but, at best. Regularity."''^ The manufacturer works 
by means of " a knack, or trick of the trade " and manages 
consciously to construct what at best is but a semblance of 
art. The artist creates unconsciously, for he discovers truth 
by a process wholly transcending the process of logic. " Shake- 
speare's Art," says Carlyle, " is not Artifice ; the noblest worth 
of it is not there by plan or contrivance.""''^ Unlike Scott, who 
is a fashioner and not a creator, Shakespeare and Goethe create 
their characters " from the heart outwards.""''^ Faust is em- 
phatically a work of art, " matured in the mysterious depths of 
a vast and wonderful mind."-'"' " Boswell's grand intellectual 
talent was, as such ever is, an unconscious one."*"* The man- 
ufacturer works with his understanding, but the creative artist 
is endowed with reason, that divine faculty, by which, accord- 
ing to the post-Kantians and the younger German romanticists, 
the poet and the thinker can penetrate to the heart of truth. 

But it is not to the content of art alone that Carlyle's theory 
of creation applies. It includes form and the relation of form 
to content. I'^orm, he holds, has a subjective origin and should 
be judged finally by a standard from within ; nothing in art 
is determined from without by established or conventional rules. 
" Genius has privileges of its own, it selects an orbit for itself." 
It is limited to one rule, that of seeing truth, of discovering 
meanings. The appropriate form will follow, the artist will 
not know how, and it is " to be judged by the inward qualities 

*> Essays, II, 88-107. '^Essays, VI, 69. 

"'Essays, II, 165; cf. 281. "* Essays, I, 131. 

"Heroes, 100. ''Essays, IV, 78. 



34 

of the Spirit which it is employed to body forth." " The 
ivord that he speaks is the man himself." " There is no uni- 
form of excellence," says Carlyle, " all Genuine things are what 
they ought to be."^° Again, therefore, Carlyle returns to an 
ethical standard. " In poetry," he says, " we have heard of no 
secret possessing the smallest effectual virtue, except this one 
general secret ; that the poet is a man of a purer, higher, richer 
nature than other men ; which higher nature shall itself, after 
earnest inquiry, have taught him the proper form for embody- 
ing its inspirations, as indeed the imperishable beauty of these 
will shine, with more or less distinctness, through any form 
whatever."^^ The process of artistic creation, whether we 
speak of form or of content, or of both, thus integrates with 
Carlyle's theory of poetry. The object of the poet is truth. 
He discovers it by his faculty of vision or insight. He bodies 
it forth by means of the creative process. This process — itself 
a product of the highest intellectual culture — works myste- 
riously within the innermost recesses of the mind, where it 
weaves the appropriate garment for the truth which has been 
revealed.^^ 

Now that we have before us the principles underlying Car- 
lyle's ideals of literature, it is proper to say something of their 
source. The doctrine thus far presented is a coherent one, 
but it is not original. Much of it may be paralleled in Aris- 
totle, in Horace, and in the critics of the Italian Renaissance.^® 
The idea of poetry as a higher philosophy, the idea that it de- 
pends for its vitality upon thought rather than upon form and 
that meter is not an essential and distinguishing characteristic, 
and the regard for poetry chiefly as an interpretation of life 
and a guide to conduct, these are ideas which were taught and 
believed hundreds of years before Carlyle gave expression to 
them. But there is no evidence that he was directly indebted 

^^ Essays, I, 16-17, 128; IV, 62-63, 87; Heroes, 96-97. 

^^ Essays, II, 115. 

^^ Brandes points out that A. W. Schlegel learned from Goethe " that 
perfect technique has an inward origin " (Main Currents, II, 53). Cole- 
ridge says that "organic form is innate ". (Literary Criticism, 186). 

^' Cf. Spingarn, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, II. 



35 

to critics and thinkers of a former age. His literary creed has 
a much later parentage. It owes its origin to romanticism and 
to some of the sources from which romanticism itself sprang. 
In its attitude of revolt from neo-classical standards, in its 
glorification of poets and poetry, in its declaration that genius 
has a right to choose its own path, Carlyle's romanticism ex- 
presses a general agreement with the new literary movements 
of the nineteenth century. It differs widely from much of 
the romanticism in England (that of Scott and Keats for ex- 
amples) in that it rests upon definite doctrines which go 
back to the transcendental philosophy of Germany.*" But it 
has much in common with romanticism in Germany, because 
romanticism began among the Germans as an organized move- 
ment, established upon principles derived mainly from Kant 
and from the writings of Schiller and Goethe. The original 
sources of Carlyle's doctrine, therefore, take us back to the 
transcendental philosophy. 

The German literature of his day, says Carlyle, owes its in- 
spiration to the critical philosophy created by Kant and devel- 
oped by Fichte and Schelling. " Such men as Goethe and 
Schiller," he says, " cannot exist without effect in any literature 
or in any century; but if one circumstance more than another 
has contributed to forward their endeavors, and introduce that 
higher tone into the literature of Germany, it has been this phil- 
osophical system."*^ The fullest interpretations of this system 
to be found in the essays are in The State of German Literature 
and in Novalis. Its general outlines are well known. It is 
opposed to the sensational philosophy of Locke and to the 
skeptical philosophy of Hume, because, as Carlyle says, it 
"commences from within. "^^ Space and time are forms and 
matter has no real existence. The visible world is but a 

*° Where Carlyle's ideals correspond with these of Wordsworth and 
Coleridge, a common origin may be found in German philosophy and 
literature. Carlyle had a low opinion of Coleridge as a thinker, but he 
certainly had read the Biographia Literaria (e. g., II, 184), and he 
must have profited by Coleridge's criticism (e. g., Heroes, 84) ; though I 
can find no indications of direct indebtedness. There are also some in- 
teresting correspondences between Shelley's theories and Carlyle's. 

*^ Essays, I, 66 ; IV, 36. ■" Essays, I, 67. 



36 

shadow of the eternal mind. The universe is therefore spirit- 
ual through and through. God and man are the only realities. 
Even the individual ego is only a light-sparkle floating on the 
ether of deity. Truth, reality or fact (it matters not which 
term we use) is apprehended by man intuitively, that is, by the 
*' inward eye " of reason, the mind's supreme faculty ; whereas 
all practical and material knowledge," such as comes within 
the ken of logic, is the product of the understanding, a useful 
but a lower organ of the intellect. In this transcendentalism 
there is a mystical or poetical mingling of the systems of Kant, 
Fichte and Schelling.*^ The terms reason and understanding, 
used so frequently by Carlyle in his criticism, are Kantian in 
origin, but the meaning which they carry in the essays is defin- 
itely Fichtean.** The notion of literature as a revelation of the 
divine idea, and of the poet as a seer, is also Fichtean.*^ From 
Fichte is derived the theory of artistic creation as an uncon- 
scious process. Since space and time are forms, " Deity is 
ommipresent and eternal "*® and apprehended by reason work- 
ing in its own mystical manner — a statement of Fichte's doc- 
trine of the infinite self. Trace Carlyle's speculations where 
we will, we are certain to emerge upon a path that leads 
straight to the transcendental philosophy. The thinker of 
Craigenputtock lived in a shadow-world far more real to him 
than the gray moors which surrounded his solitary home. 

** Carlyle probably never read Kant's Critique through (Note-Books, 
119), but he read about Kant on all sides. He quotes from Fichte's Uber 
das Wesen des Gelehrten (Essays, I, 50) and he refers to Fichte's Wissen- 
schaftslehre (Essays, II, 201, 204). Schelling is rarely referred to (Es- 
says, I, 71 ; Heroes, 75). Carlyle freely used the Kantian terms reason 
and understanding, but, as regards reason, not in a strictly Kantian sense. 
Kant never denied the existence of matter and he remained a realist. Car- 
lyle's thinking for the most part is identical with the subjective idealism 
of Fichte (i. e., he is all in all a Fichtean ; our me is the only reality, and 
nature is but the reflex of our own inward force; Sartor, I, 8, 9, lo), 
Sometimes he interprets the world in terms of Schelling's objective ideal- 
ism, as when he says that the universe is " the realized Thought of 
God." Heroes, 75. 

** Reason in Carlyle's criticism is about equivalent to imagination in 
Hazlitt's and Coleridge's. 

"Essays, I, 50-52. *' Essays, II, 205. 



37 

But Carlyle's debt to Schiller, to Goethe and to the German 
romanticists was also very great. We should not be exceeding 
the truth if we said that he borrowed his ideas concerning the 
nature and function of poetry first from the poets, and after- 
ward traced such as were fundamental back to the philosophers. 
It is not, however, the purpose of this study to explore minutely 
the wide field from which Carlyle gathered his ideas. These 
ideas, strewn broadcast everywhere, acted as a powerful fer- 
tilizing influence ; and no important mind in German literature 
at that period came to fruition without receiving from them a 
quickening impulse. We shall therefore be content here to 
point out but a few of the literary origins, such as are unques- 
tionable and easy of access in the essays themselves, and leave 
others to be referred to in later chapters as occasion requires. 

The ideals of modern German poetry, as Carlyle interpreted 
them in his essay on The State of German Literature, are prac- 
tically identical with those which we have set forth in the pre- 
ceding pages. The passage which he quotes from Schiller's 
Letters on the Esthetic Education of Man is notable.*^ A few 
sentences from this will illustrate the close correspondence be- 
tween Schiller's doctrine and Carlyle's. 

After an artist has grown to manhood under a distant Grecian sky, says 
Schiller, let him return into his century, " not, however, to delight it by 
his presence ; but terrible, like the Son of Agamemnon, to purify it. The 
matter of his works he will take from the present ; but their Form he will 
derive from a nobler time, nay from beyond all time, from the absolute 
unchanging unity of his nature. ..." Let the artist " leave to. mere 
Understanding, which is here at home, the province of the actual ; while 
he strives, by uniting the possible with the necessary, to produce ' the 
ideal." " 

If to these sentences we add still others from The Life of Schil- 
ler (175-176), wherein Carlyle interprets the poet's ideas con- 
cerning the nature and function of literature, we may see that 
Carlyle must have received both ideas and inspiration from 
Schiller. The huge array of definitions and technical terms in 
Schiller's writings on aesthetics repelled Carlyle; but in certain 

" Carlyle quotes the passage twice elsewhere, either in part or as a 
whole {Life of Schiller, 176; Essays, III, 94). 

*^ Essays, I, 48. \ 



38 

fundamental articles, such as the transcendental origin of 
poetry and the exalted idea of the purpose of literature and 
of the character of the poet, he believed as devoutly as did 
Schiller. 

Important as was Schiller's influence it is hardly to be com- 
pared with that which Goethe exerted, for Goethe was to Car- 
lyle the highest representative of modern poetry and unlike 
Schiller, a poet born, not made. He was the complete man — 
poet, philosopher, teacher. The book of Goethe's to which 
Carlyle owed most is beyond a doubt Wilhclm Mcistcr. The 
opinions on art and conduct interwoven into this work were for 
him the bread of life. " I have not got as many ideas from 
any book for six years," he wrote to Jane Welsh in 1824.*^ 
Wherever, in his writings, he speaks intimately of it, there is 
something of reverence in his words. From the Apprentice- 
ship Carlyle learned that it should be the purpose of poetry to 
express the universal and the ideal, and that these should be 
found in the conditional world in which we live, not above it 
or under it. He learned that art should deal with wholes, that 
poetry and prose are not at variance, and that the poet is a 
sacred character, " a teacher, a prophet, a friend of gods and 
men."^" The second part of VVilhelm Meister, The Travels, 
moved Carlyle's spirit more deeply than did the Apprenticeship, 
but it could scarcely have taught him more of art or life. It 
contains, however, the kernel of his doctrine, and in a letter to 
Goethe he speaks of it as " an embodiment of all that is finest in 
the Philosophy of Art and Life," and he says it " has almost 
assumed the aspect of perfection in his thoughts. "^^ Erom 
the essential teachings of these two parts of Wilhelm Meister 
Carlyle never departed. He found Goethe's transcendentalism 
more congenial to his nature than he did Schiller's ; for Goe- 
the's ideas concerning literary art grew up from the rich soil 
of his own experience. He lived, so Carlyle thought, under 
the guidance of reason, not of passion ; and his mind, in unity 
with itself, dwelt serenely within the realm of " the Whole, the 

** Froude, Life, I, 171. '"Essays, I, 194-197. 

°^ Corres., 66. For art theories in The Travels see Carlyle's translation, 
III, 123-131. 



39 

Good, and the True."°- Though these ideals received an un- 
goethean emphasis from Carlyle as time went on, they remained 
the animating heart of his message, ahke on poetry, on history 
and on society/'^ 

Next to Goethe and Schiller the German authors who most 
hifluenced Carlyle were Richter and Novalis. It was, how- 
ever, chiefly as literary interpreters of the critical philosophy 
that they had any appreciable influence upon his ideals of 
literature. In Richter he discovered a transcendentalist to 
whom nature was " a mysterious Presence." Richter was not 
a novelist, at least in the usual sense, but " a Philosopher and 
Moral Poet." He was a mystic v/ho clothed "his wild way- 
ward dreams, allegories and shadowy imaginings " in a style 
extravagant, metaphorical, complex and abounding in humor. 
He was Carlyle's brother Titan, preaching in a similar dialect 
against a skeptical and mechanical age.^* Jean Paul was the 
forerunner of another mystic, Novalis, who, as Professor Royce 
says, was " the true romantic interpreter of Fichte's doctrine." 
For a time at least Carlyle was much moved by the singular 
productions from the pen of this young dreamer. His various 
and extended quotations from the writings of Novalis, whether 
on poetry or philosophy, art or conduct, imply a large spiritual 
indebtedness. Novalis is the typical German mystic, the man 
steeped in Kantian metaphysics, who has in him " an un- 
fathomed mine of philosophical ideas " and who regards the 
visible world only as a manifestation of deity.^^ In so far as 
ideas are concerned, therefore, Novalis, like Richter, was for 

^Essays, I, 279; IV, 50. 

^^ A Spinozist rather than a Kantist, Goethe was all the more a believer 
in the transcendental origin of poetry, and in the unconscious process of 
poetic creation (cf. Meister, II, 188). He believed also in the essential 
oneness of the beautiful and the true, with which " the morally good is 
inseparably connected " (Bielschowsky, Life of Goethe, II, 392. For an 
interpretation of Goethe's ideas see also II, 161-2, 2,27, 391-2; III, 31-34, 
51, 56, 61, loo-ioi). Sayings on art paralleling Carlyle's are abundant in 
Dichtung ttnd Wahrheit and in the Gespriiche. 

^Essays, I, 8, 13 ; cf. II, 268-275. The humor and style of Richter were 
considerable influences upon Carlyle, but with these we are not here 
concerned. ^° Essays, II, 226, 206. 



. 40 

Carlyle rather an inspiring interpreter of other men's doc- 
trines than a teacher of his own. Both these German roman- 
ticists immensely stimulated Carlyle, because they clothed their 
messages in a language that strongly appealed to his delight in 
humor and his love of the mystical ; but they did not furnish 
him vvitii ideas that he could not have found in the writings 
either of Goethe and Schiller or of the philosophers. 

Like the theories of Novalis, of Friedrich Schlcgel and other 
German romanticists, those of Carlyle not only* had their roots 
in the transcendental philosophy, but they grew and expanded 
until they embraced nearly every significant expression of the 
human spirit. Literature was regarded not as a manifestation 
of a phase of man's activities merely, but as the quintessence 
of the soul's life everywhere. Poetry, said the romanticists, 
is life ; poetry, said Carlyle, is the vital spirit of histories, con- 
stitutions, and creeds, as well as of epics and philosophies. 
Whatever voices the soul of humanity, that is poetry. The 
significance of this belief, in connection with a study of Car- 
lyle's mind, can scarcely be exaggerated ; for in his ideas con- 
cerning the relation of poets and poetry to society, his original- 
ity first finds expression, his independent moral convictions first 
rise to the surface. He drew freely upon Goethe and the 
romanticists for the social aspects of his poetical theories, but 
he did not develop these theories in the direction of the neo- 
classicism or symbolism of the later Goethe, nor did he sym- 
pathize with the voluptuous and sensual dreams, the religious 
vagaries and other fantastic excesses, into which Novalis and 
his brethren of the new school finally descended. Rathef, we 
hear more and more often the native Scotch voice and we feel 
the impulse of the rigorous puritan prophet. We are drawn 
into a current of thought that ultimately carries us away from 
literature into hero-worship and prophecy. 

Among the various ideas which imply the social side of Car- 
lyle's poetic theory, perhaps the most inclusive is one that 
Goethe impressed upon him, namely, the universality of the 
poet's mind. The poet is the embodiment of the highest intel- 
lectual achievements of the race. Lie is the oracle of the eter- 
nal longings and strivings of common humanity. In him, says 



41 

Carlyle, we see " a freer, purer development of whatever is 
noblest in ourselves. "°*' Poetry is therefore universal in its 
nature and its appeal. Goethe often sought to impress Carlyle 
with its cosmopolitan character. " It is obvious," he writes, 
"that the efforts of the best poets and aesthetic writers have 
now for some time been directed towards what is universal in 
humanity." " What is truly excellent," he adds, " is distin- 
guished by its belonging to all mankind." To which Carlyle 
replies that these doctrines, so far as he has seized their full 
import, " command his entire assent." Goethe also impressed 
him with a sense of the great importance of a commerce of 
ideas between nations, and he seized every opportunity to 
preach to Carlyle the lesson that art is a matter of international 
concern.'^^ Carlyle was prompt to take up and apply this 
teaching. For a decade and longer, when literary England was 
more than usually insular in its spirit and when its attitude of 
moral and intellectual superiority was unwarrantably offensive, 
Carlyle defiantly asserted that art is independent of mode and 
true for all nations and all men. It was no longer possible, 
he urged, for a people to live exclusively within the narrow 
realm of their own ideas ; and he therefore welcomed the in- 
pouring of ideas from Germany, since this would mean a com- 
parison of "English with foreign judgment" and a renewal 
of intercourse and revival of intellectual life among civilized 
peoples.-'"'® Carlyle ardently advocated these notions, because 
he believed that art is universal, the message of the Time- 
Spirit to men. 

Mention of the Time-Spirit suggests a second phase of 
Carlyle's doctrines concerning the relation of literature to so- 
ciety. He learned from Fichte that " each age, by the law of 
its nature, is different from every other age, and demands a 
different representation of the Divine Idea, the essence of 
which is the same in all."^° He quotes Schiller to the effect 
that the medium of the poet's truth must come from his own 
age f° and the text of Goethe's greatest sermon was that the 

'"Essays, II, 6: cf. Essays, I, 212, 281. 

''' Corrcs., 24-25, 33. 

'^Essays, I, 179, 199, 200, 282; III, 221. 

'''Essays, I, 50. '^Essays, I, 49. 



42 

ideal must be built upon the actual. From these sources he 
learned that literature which leaves a world of men to dwell 
apart in a visionary, romantic or supernatural realm is a litera- 
ture unsound and unsubstantial, unworthy of the name of art.''^ 
This notion grew to be the most important one in Carlyle's 
literary creed. It claimed the largest share of his interest and 
received from him an altogether original emphasis. Accord- 
ing to this theory of literary art, the poet should interpret his 
own age, he should be his age's highest and truest interpreter. 
Of all men he is the one in his time to sift the true from the 
false, the permanent from the transient. It is a man's highest 
enterprise, says Carlyle, " that of being the Poet of his Age."''- 
In this doctrine we find the explanation of Carlyle's almost ex- 
clusive interest in the great representative writers, who inter- 
pret national movements and who stand out as the intellectual 
leaders of their respective periods. " The great man," he says, 
"' does, in good truth, belong to his own age ; nay more so than 
any other man ; being properly the synopsis and epitome of 
such age with its interests and influences. "^'^ The critical 
essays throughout witness to Carlyle's genius for interpreting 
and portraying tlie representative mind. Goethe is the " high- 
est man of his time." and the " history of his mind is, in fact, 
the history of German culture in his day." In Voltaire, says 
Carlyle. we have "a European subject, or there never was 
one." \'oltaire is the " man of his century," '' the paragon and 
epitome of a whole spiritual period." Diderot, too, is " a sig- 
nificant epitome " of the age of Louis X\^. Johnson is the 
'' John Bull of Spiritual Europe," the ideal Tory. " Dante 
is the spokesman of the Middle Ages.""'* On the other 
hand Carlyle is not drawn to minds not of the first order, 

^^ Essays, I, 195: II, 12, 13. ^Essays, II, 51; III, 2-4-5. 

^Essays, IV, 91; cf. I, 39. Though Carlyle derived these ideas, in so 
far as they relate exclusively to poets, mainly from Germany, they really 
express an attitude towards life that was taken independently. The plan 
of treating certain leaders of the Commonwealth as " representative," 
mentioned in the previous chapter, shows that the historical method, as 
well as the idea of hero-worship, was of independent origin (E. Letters, 
206, 260). 

^Essays, IV, 175; I, 176; II, 124, 125, 128; V, 4; IV, 128; Heroes, 91. 



43 

nor is he attracted by the lesser, out-of-the-way influences 
originating- with such minds. The by-ways of literature 
do not lure him from its beaten high-road. He speaks of " the 
sonnet, elegy, song " as belonging to the " out-lying province 
of poetry." He says that the Vicar of Wakefield is a modern 
idyl " and nothing more." He thinks that no true poet will 
ever dwindle " into a man of Vers de Societe."^-' Truth in its 
fulness and in its representative character, he held, can be re- 
vealed only in minds of the first rank and not in minds of the 
second, except as "secondary symptoms."*"^ If it be asked 
why it was then that Carlyle showed so much interest in Rich- 
ter and Novalis and was so profoundly affected by the careers 
of Burns and Byron (two names which, next to Goethe's, occur 
most often in his essays), we may say that these writers 
scarcely furnish an exception to the rule. Richter and Novalis 
were for Carlyle literary exponents of transcendentalism, the 
one a humorist, the other a mystic; both were minds that re- 
vealed truth. Carlyle loved and reverenced Burns because 
Burns was a native Scotch product and a song-maker of 
Shakespearian and universal order. He and Byron were the 
two British men of their age who were born to be poets in the 
high and ancient sense, but whom fortune and an undisciplined 
will prevented from delivering their message to the world. 
They were praised by Carlyle rather for their promised, than 
for their actual, achievement ; and their tragical lives afforded 
him the texts of a hundred sermons. 

Carlyle's idea of the poet as a representative man includes 
also the idea of him as the highest man of his time. In the 
strict sense art is aristocratic. Spiritual truth is born to one 
man here, to another there, but not in the same degree or 
kind to all men.^^ Art has therefore no concern with popular- 
ity ; it makes no appeal to the popular ear, and is not dependent 
for approval upon the popular voice. Popularity affords no 
index, Carlyle says, of originality or greatness, for the favor 
of the many is no criterion of the value of literature. " In 
fact," he says, " the popular man, and the man of true, at 

^'^ Essays, II, 90; I, 185; I, 36. 

^ Essays, V, 47. *^ Essays, II, 246. 



44 



lc;isl of iMc;it oi ij;iii;ilil y, ;iit' seldom one .iiul llic s.iiiic. 'I'lir 
|)o|)iil.ii 111:111 sIjimIs oil oiif own level, llie ori}.;iii;il 111.111 sI.iikIs 

;i hove 11;. I'lie iiiiill il mle ol' voiees i:, no .nil lioi ll \' " ; " l;iiiie 

is no sure le;,l ol llieill." To illlisliate .111(1 Mlppoll these 

((pinions (iiilyle was loiid ol ( iliii;; llie popiil.nil y ol Kol/ehiie 
whose plays, ho says, li.id heeii ai le(| "in every llie.iire IroiM 
Kanilsch.-itk.'i lo ("adi/," hit! who loi ;ill llial w.is "a lifeless 
linndle (d (l\cd iaj.;s.""" 'The line po( I will rely wholly npoii 
himself, since Ihe inspiialion .is well .is Ihe t'lidiiriuj^' tiiiHi of 
his message oiiidnales in his own sold. Arl is ,'irislocral ie he 
cause it is the enalioii (d Ihe hijdiesl minds, .iiid hee.iuse il 
m.iKes ils appe.il indepeiideiil l\ <d lln' praise or hlaiiie ((I the 
ninllilnde."" 

We le.ieli llie s.iiiie eoiu 111 .ion al whalever point we t.ike lip 
a sliid\' (d ( ail\le's lileiai\' ideals, lu'ciiise ;i eoiisistenl .iiiil 
tniifoiin doelime iindei lies evi'iy I'xpression (d them. W' r 
liave discussed ihe soiial aspi'cis of these idi'als and we are 
lell upon ,1 path llial le.ids lis immedi.ileU' into the held oi'cil- 
pie;l h\ Ihe woiks of ihe later ( ail\le. I'loin llie saiiu" mystic 
re}.;ioii (d tlu- iiiicoiiscioiis proceed "all I'oesies, and l\elii;ioiis, 
and .Social .S\sU'nis.""' The poet twolves into llu- hero, and 
poetry ht'coines liisloi\. This chaiii^e on the siiilace implies 
no ehaiij;e imdei iie.ith, for the philosophv that forms the hasis 
<»f ("ailyle's literals' ireed is the loinid.ilion .dike of his politital 
and economical tlu-ories, his theories of ethics, education and 
rt'h^ion. I'o Ust llu- accuracy of this slatement, we have only 
to let .ill llie pi iiuiples proclaimed in e\'ei\ 11011 critical wrilini; 
Iroin Cluiiailt'i istirs to Ut-nu's and /'(/.s7 (/;/(/ I'rrst'iit. The 
a^'e which ('ailyU' looks out upon is thrown sick, skeptii'al, me 

*" /';.v.v,/,v.v, III, iin; I, .•!(.; II, 1 .| .• ; \l. .; 1 ; II, So; 111, -■-is. 

•" /i.v.VK.v.v. II, <), SI. ('.ulylc was llu- l.iiliuv.l Ircmi saying tliat art is 
rrjttrii'tnl lo tin- u|i|i<r tl.isscs. lie ii|i|ii>s<il I'ltiuli oiiiiiioiis ol lliis suit, 
and lif tipimsi'il I' ii|.',!i,';h ifvit'wciN wliu il.iiiiicd lliat (Icrmaii aulluirs wfif 
Sdciallv low a^. ll tiial inaMrrc-d. lie asscilnl a^■.aill and a^aiii lliat art 
i,M iiuli|i(iidcut ol laidv. (iocltu-. lu- saiil, was "iicillur iiolilc, nor 
pirlx'iaii, iifilliii Iduial iioi scivdi-, nor inlidfl nor dfvotfr," hut il " I'lrar 
luul iinivrisal M.m " i/v.\./v.v, I, iSo). As rrnards t'.vtrrnul diiTcrfUct'H of 
aofifly, lift is drinoi-i'ulii". Tlu- artist may sptiiiK Iroiii any rank or any 
pfoplr (/;.\\v<).v.v, 1, .u ,|ij. kjo). '" ILisnys, IV, ^S. 



46 

clianical, utililaiiaii. Ucfornis, scIk'UK'S of ^ovcniiiiciil, new 
rcnicdii-s fcjr social ills, an- tinavailiii}^, because witlioiil excep- 
tion lliey lu'^in from the outside instead of from williin. No 
reloiiii loiiiils, says ("arlyle, except a moral one. Ilenlliamile 
ethics and economics, |;"overnment by lairsacz-Jairc, religion 
llirouj^li "evidences" and " tlieoloj.i;ii's," alike strive lo clianj^e 
man by macliinery, vvlien he can be Iransformed only by spirit. 
Society does indeed exist to protect my pro[)erty, but my pro])- 
crty is the " fJfc in mi'." Happiness is not and never can be 
a result of external arrangement, 'ihe vital prin(ii)le of ail 
proj4"ress, economical, educational, rc-li^^ious, is that "soul is 
kindled only by soul." Wliat the ay^e needs therefore is a hero, 
and a j^-overnment by aristocracy, for, "he who is to be my 
l^uler was clujsen for me in Heaven." It scarcely needs to be 
|)ointed ont that this entire creed is only an expansion, or de- 
velopment, ol the- one that we have been interpret inj; in liie 
foregoinj.;" pages, (loetlie, a poet in one decade, is for Car- 
lyle a prophet in the next. I \r is the hero to whom a sick age 
must look for relief. 'I he nature and mission of the |)oet as 
set forth in the earlier es.says do not dilfer in essentials from 
the nature and nu'ssion of the hero as describe(l in every social 
and political pamphlet. '1 he hero, like tlu: poet, is an (jracle 
of a world unseen. ''' 

'"Essays, IV, J05 ; V, .so; VI, 14'); H, 2,i<> ; Vi, 17';; Sartor h'c.utrlus, 
172, 175. 



CrTAPTI'.R TTT 
li)i;.\i.s t)K C'uriuiSM 
((/) J'rincif'lrs and Mrlluxls 

Carlyk-'s tlu-ory of li(ci;iliiri' diiiTiuiiU'S llu' principles aiul 
methods of his crilicisin. 'Vhv slaiulaids oi jiuIjmikmiI which 
ho apphod lo the iiilciprctaliou of authors ami their work grew 
out of his ideas of the nature and function of poetry. These 
priiici])les are apphi-d in evi-ry critical essay from lirst to last 
but they are rarely stated in direct form in the later essays, in 
which the treatment is so larj^ely l)i(\i;raphical. They are to 
he found t-hii'ily in the criticism before iS^^J, in some in- 
stances expressetl in brief categorical assertions, and in a few 
others expandinl into something like a formal declaration or 
manifesto. The fullest statements occur in two essays, Tlu' 
State of (Jcnnan lAtcratiirc (1827) and Cocthc (i8jS). In 
stibstance both declarations arc> the same, but the earlier one 
fraukh professt\s to be no m*Me than an interpretation (>f Cler- 
nian i)rinciples. We shall therefore ([note ii\>m the second, 
in which ("arlyle's position is taken independently: 

" W'l- ;in' liiiii lii'licvc'ts in tlic iii;i.\im," lio .say.s, " tliat, (Hr all li^lit 
judKiiuiit itf any n\aii or liiiiiK, it is useful, nay essential, to see his good 
(lualilics iit'fore pronoiiiUMiiK on his l)ail. . . . l.et us consider what_ we 
mean l>y a laiili. Uy llu- wotil l.uilt wo dcsimiali' something that displeases 
us%, that i-iinliadii'ls us. IWil lii-rc (lie iiiicstiuM luinht arise: Who are -.vcf 
This r.iiill dispU-ascs, ronttadiiMs us; so I'ar is oli-ar ; and had .(•<•, had / 
and my pleasure and I'oiiluin.iliiin lucii the i-hicf I'ud ot the pi>et, then 
douhtless he has failed in thai cud, and his laiill ri-inains ii veniediably, 
and without defeiu-e. ihit who sh.dl say whether sueh really was his 
object, whether sueh oui;ht to have l)een liis ohjeet? and if it was not 
and ounlit not lo li.nc heen, what hecomes ol the t'aull ? It must Ikuik 
altogether uudieidiil ; we as yet know nothing of it ; perhaps it may not he 
the poet's, hut our own fault; perhaps it may be no fault whatever. To 
see rightly into this matter, to determine with any infallibility, whether 
what we lall a t.ndt is in very deed Ji fault, we must previously have 
st-ltU'd twii points, neither of which may he so reailily settleil. First, we 

4f) 



47 

uiiisl have iiiadi' plain lo ourselves wliat the poet's aim really and truly 
was, how the task he had to do stootl helore his own eye, and liow tar, 
with such means as it allorded him, he has fuliillcd it. Secondly, we must 
have decided whether and how far this aim, this task of his, accorded, — not 
with us, and our individual crochets, and (he crochets of our little senate 
where we give or take the law,— but with human nature and the nature of 
things at larRe ; with the universal principles of poetic lieauty, not as they 
stand wiitteii in our text hooks, hut in the hearts and imaj^in.itions of all 
men. Does the .inswer in either case come out unlavorably ; was there an 
inconsistency hetwi'cn the means .and the en<I, a discortlance hetweeii the 
end and the truth, there is a fault: was there not. there is no f.-iult. 

" Thus it would appear that the detection of faults, provided they he 
faults of any depth and conse(|uence, leads us of itself into that region 
where also the higher beauties of the piece, if it have any true beauties, 
essentially reside. In fact, according to our view, no m.m can pronounce 
dogmatically with even a chance of Inring right, on the laults of a i)oein, 
till he has seen its very last and highest beauty ; the last in becoming 
visible to anyone, which few evi'r look after, which indeed in most pieces 
it were very vain to look aflir; the beauty of the poem as a Whole, in the 
strict sense; the clear view of it as an indivisible Unity; and whether it 
has grown up naturally from the general soil of Thought." This criticism, 
Carlyle goes on to say, is not concerned with poetry that amuses, " for 
the study of which no man is required to give rules," but with poetry of a 
very different kind. " We speak of that Poetry which Masters write, 
which aims not at ' furnishing a languid mind with fantastic shows and 
indolent emotions,' but at incorporating th<; everlasting Reason of man in 
forms visible to his Sinse, and suitable to it." ' 

In this iiiatiifcsto Carlyle seeks to establish two fiiiKlaincntal 
principles of literary criticism. First, criticism is to deal only 
with serious literature, the nature of which we have analy/.ed 
in the ])revious chapter. Second, it should be constructive in 
its aims and methods, in order to be constructive, criticism 
has several finictions to perform, each related to the other, and 
all together constituting a method, in theory at least, lx)tb com- 
prehensive and profound. To bej^in with, criticism is inter])re- 
tative. The critic must strive to see the poet's work, his aim 
and accomplishment, as the poet himself saw it; he must dis- 
cover the author's innermost purpose, must study his work 
from within, imist, in a word, penetrate to the soul of the poet 
and be able to describe what he discerns there. He cannot 
do this unless he commands a sympathy of the highest order, 

' Essays, I, 218-221 ; cf. I, 283-4, 



>f 



48 

unless he is himself a sccr. Next the critic must judge the 
work of a writer in terms of universal principles as they 
are revealed in the unfolding order of the world and are found 
written in the heart of man. In the accomplishment of this 
task, criticism has to regard wholes, not parts ; since the final 
beauty of a poem, its permanent message or meaning, resides 
in an organic unity, without which literature is dead, a lifeless 
bundle of fragments. The interpretative method of criticism 
thus leads into the philosophical. The critic must not only 
have imagination and insight, he must also possess philosophi- 
cal grasp and power of integration. When he has brought the 
poet's truth to light, it is his further duty to relate that truth 
to the larger environing world, both of general principles 
and of men and movements.- These two great methods of 
criticism — the interpretative and the philosophical — imply 
still others, the biographical, the historical and the compar- 
ative, the first two of which were defined and developed 
more completely by Carlyle than by any of his British 
contemporaries. It was a favorite saying of his, as we have 
pointed out, that the critic should see the poet's object as the 
poet himself saw it." To do this the critic not only has to 
grasp the form in its totality, but he has also to know as much 
as possible of the poet's mind, within and without, from which 
this totality has grown. He must ask, says Carlyle, whether 
the unity " has grown up naturally from the general soil of 
Thought." The i)rinciple stated in its simplest terms is this: 
a true poem is a unity, which in turn springs from a deeper 
unity of mind ; mind again is the result of two forces, alw-ays 
working together, and in great poets harmoniously together — 

'■'It is cverywluTc implied in Carlyle that in the unily of a iiocni resides 
its relation to, or rather its rcvcUition of, the infinite, or the transcen- 
dcntally real ; c. g., " I see some vague outline of what a whole is ; also 
how an individual delineation may be ' informed with the Infinite,' may 
appear hanging in the universe of lime and space (partly) : in which case 
is it a poem and a whole?" Froudc, TI, 70. 

'In addition to the long passage quoted above see I, 283-4, 129; II, 
128, 225 ; Life of Schiller, 2. Carlyle's method of procedure is like that of 
Sainte-Beuve, who, as Professor Harper remarks, " analyses the tempera- 
ments and characters of authors as a means of appreciating their works." 
Sciintc-Bcuvc, 335. 



49 

innate .si)irit and environment. Merc then is tlie jj^erni of the 
biogTaphical and historical methods of criticism. And inas- 
much as Carlyle held that a literary work does not develop in 
isolation, but rather side by side with many others of similar 
kind, all of which is it of advantage to consider together, he 
expanded his historical method to include virtually another ' 
that in later years has been widely known as the comparative. 
Let us examine each in turn. 

A passage from the essay on Gocihc contains the essence of 
the biographical method. Of Goethe's poetry Carlyle says that 
it " is no separate faculty, no mental handicraft ;• but the voice 
of the whole harmonious manhood : nay, it is the very har- 
mony of that rich manhood which forms his poetry."* Since 
the organic unity of a poem or of poetry .Springs from the total 
intellectual life of its author, since the total thought or mean- .ft 

ing of a work is in fact that intellectual life transmitted to it . (?5>/ 
by the poet's creative power, the poet's mind and the unity _ ij 
of his literary creation are one and the same. If you know \ 
the poet's mind, you know the poetry he has written; if you 
know the poetry in its totality, you also know the mind from 
which it originated, 'i'his principle, as Carlyle would say, 
applies in strictness only to poets and poetry of the first 
rank, to those writers who have succeeded in revealing some 
phase of the Divine Idea. U])on this principle, therefore, the 
relation between the man and the book is direct and vital : the 
writing is a rellex of the writer, just as the writer in turn is a 
"Reflex of the All."'"' 

This biographical method determines the general structure 
of nearly all of the critical essays. Carlyle first presents an 
account of the writer's life, emphasizing such facts as appear 
to him characteristic and offering some reflections upon the • 
man regarded as a living unity. The work of the author he re- 
gards as an expression of his character, as indeed an integral 
part of it, revealed now not in actions but in words. In the 
earliest of the collected works, the Life of Schiller we find an 
application of this method, though the nature of the work pre- 
vented a thoroughgoing use of it. " It would be interesting," 

'Essays. I, i8o. " Jbid., V, 5. 



50 

Carlylo sriys, " to discover by what <;'ifts and what employment 
of tliem |Scliiller| reaclu'd the eminence on which we now 
see him ; to follow the steps of his intellectual and moral cul- 
ture; to leather from his life and works some picture of him- 
self. It is worth in(|nirinj;-, whether he, who could reiiresent 
noble actions so well, did himself act nobly; how those powers 
of intellect, which in philosophy and art achieved so much, 
applied themselves to tlie everyday emergencies of life; how 
the j^enerous ardour, which delii^hts us in his poetry, displayed 
itself in the common intercourse between man and man. Tt 
would at once instruct and strati fy us if we could understand 
him thorout;hly, could transport om-selves into his circum- 
stances outward and inward, could see as he saw, and feel as he 
felt."" These self-imposed (piesli<Mis imlicate a keen curiosity 
on the part of the critic as to whether there is a conformity, 
a livings harmony, between Schiller's life and works, as upon 
" Carlyle's theory there should be. Accordingly each of the three 
divisions of the life of the poet is followed by an interpretation 
of his writings regarded as an exiiression of the poet at that 
particular epoch. The whole is concluded with a characteriza- 
V, tton in wliich the close relation between Schiller the man atul 
^V^ Schiller the i)oet is the prominent feature. '^ The biographical 

^ method is fully develojicd in the introduction to Gcniiaii Ro- 

mance, and in the first Richtcr (1827). In the essay on Goethe 
Carlyle puts the following questions : ** What manner of man 
is this ? How shall we interpret, how shall we even see him ? 
What is his spiritual structure, what at least are the outward 
form and features of his mind ? 1 las he any real poetic worth ; 
how much to his own people, how much to us?"** Lie finds in 
Werner, the dramatist, an exact correspondence between man 
and work." In truth the whole body of his criticism from first 
essay to last is constructed upon this theory, that the literary 
Y^ lKM"formance of an author is. or should be, an expression of his 
nu>ral character. 

''Life of Sihilh-r. 2. 

' Cf. Essays, 111, o.). " Sdiillcr's intcIk-cliKil charactor has. as indeed is 
always the case, an accuralo conformity witti his moral one." 
"//).</.. I, 17.^ 
"Ibid., \, 117-1.8. Cf. II. -•-•5: V, 4-7. 



51 

His method is at all times likely to lead to a one-sided criti- 
cism. The critic who rei^^ards poetry as life and life as poetry 
may fail to find sustainin<^ vitality in the literary works of his 
day and come to regard the acted Hfe as the only poetry. This 
is what happened in the case of Carlylc. When he had done 
with the (jcrmans, when he came to think that no real literature 
was l)eing- produced in England, and when, tired of criticism, 
he wished to write original books, as he did more and more in- 
sistently after 1830, he inevitably gave prominence to the bio- 
graphical side, to the neglect, if not to the omission, of the 
literary. The essays on Goethe's Works, Johnson, Diderot and 
Scott, for example, give a great deal of attention to the out- 
ward life, while they show a notable disregard of very many 
important literary matters. At all times Carlyle was prone to 
make much of critical moments in a man's acted life, when his 
moral nature was supremely tried. Goethe passing from the 
Wcrtcr to the Mcistcr period. Burns at Edinburgh, Johnson 
replying to Chesterfield, Scott mounting to the summit of his 
fame, Voltaire during his last triumph at Paris, Diderot at the 
court of Catherine — these dramatic ej)isodes are introduced and 
dwelt upon more for their own sake than for the light they 
shed upon the genesis or quality of the man's literary, work. 
The biographer and the historian not infrequently threatened 
to overshadow the critic. 

From the biographical to the historical method the path is 
direct and short. '" No cliaracter," Carlyle says in Voltaire, 
" was ever rightly understood till it had first been regarded 
with a certain feeling, not of tolerance only, but of sympathy 
. . . But to judge rightly of [a man's] character, we must 
learn to look at it, not less with his eyes than with our own."^" 
To understand a poet's work from the poet's point of view, as 
sound criticism requires us to understand it, demands a careful 
consideration of his whole outer environment, social, political, 
national, epochal. Carlyle is clear and emphatic upon this 
point. The reader should be warned again, however, that with 
Carlyle environment is not everything. After we know the 
outer forces that have played upon the poet and moulded his 

"'Ibid., II, 128. 



;/^- 



.k'^ 



52 

life to a certain shape, we have still to study his original nature, 
we have yet to discover the " idea " in him that he was destined 
to reveal. The critic scornfully rejects the notion that a great 
man, vi^hether poet or hero, can be wholly " accounted " for. 
Even as art in the deepest sense is universal and perennial, and 
for these reasons independent of fashion, ^^ so the artist has 
within him a free creative spirit, which the philosophical critic 
shall appreciate after the work of the historical critic is done.^^ 
But while urging this, Carlyle in the same breath declares 
that " no man works save under conditions "^^ — a truth which 
he learned from Goethe. Perhaps the best statement of his 
position is that in the essay on Diderot : 

" It is a great truth, one side of a great truth, that Man makes the 
Circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically is the artificer of 
his own fortune. But there is another side of the same truth, that the 
man's circumstances are the element he is appointed to live and work in ; 
that he by necessity takes his complexion, vesture, embodiment, from 
these, and is in all practical manifestations modified by them almost 
without limit ; so that in another no less 'genuine sense, it can be said 
Circumstances make the Man. Now, if it continually behoves us to insist 
on the former truth towards ourselves, it equally behoves us to bear in 
mind the latter when we judge of other men.'"* 

Carlyle's appreciation of this principle as regards literature 
and literary men is two-fold. First, he everywhere insists that 
the nationality of literary work and of authors must be taken 
account of in a judgment of the one or the other. In 
the Preface to German Romance, for example, he says the 
reader must not lose sight of one thing, viz., " They are Ger- 
man novelists, not English ones ; and their Germanhood I have 
all along regarded as a quality, not as fault."^"^ Again in the 
case of Goethe, who was so persistently and ludicrously mis- 
judged by English reviewers, Carlyle asks for a just consider- 
ation of national differences : " Goethe's world is every way so 
different from ours ; it costs us such effort, we have so much 
to remember, and so much to forget, before we can transfer 
ourselves in any measure into his peculiar point of vision, that 

^^ Ibid., I, 199, 282. ^* Essays, V, 47; cf. II, 33. 

"^ Ibid., II, 243-246; Heroes, 11. ^^ Ibid., I, 231; cf. I, 227. 

"Heroes, 102. 



53 

a right study of him, for an EngHshman, even of ingenuous, 
open, inquisitive mind, becomes unusually difficult ; for a fixed, 
decided, contemptuous Englishman, next to impossible."^** The 
critic must " remember that a Foreigner is no Englishman ; 
that in judging a foreign work, it is not enough to ask whether 
it is suitable to our modes but whether it is suitable to foreign 
wants; above all, whether it is suitable to itself."^'' Second — • 
(and this point is even more significant than the first) poetry 
and poets must be interpreted in relation to their age, as its 
true representatives. Carlyle considers poetry not only as the 
choicest flower of an age, but as the essence of its history. 
The comprehensiveness of this aspect of the historical method 
as used by Carlyle is best shown in his definition of literary 
history, in which he points out that the literature of a nation 
must be taken as a whole and must be regarded as a record 
of the spiritual evolution of an entire people: 

" A History of German, or of any national Poetry, would form, taken 
in its complete sense, one of the most arduous enterprises any writer could 
engage in. Poetry, were it the rudest, so it be sincere, is the attempt which 
man makes to render his existence harmonious, the utmost he can do for 
that end : it springs therefore from his whole feelings, opinions, activity, 
and takes its character from these. It may be called the music of his 
whole manner of being ; and, historically considered, is the test how far 
Music, or Freedom, existed therein ; how far the feeling of Love, of Beauty 
and Dignity, could be elicited from that peculiar situation of his, and from 
the views he there had of Life and J^ature, of the Universe, internal and 
external. Hence, in any rneasure to understand the Poetry, to estimate its 
worth and historical meaning, we ask as a quite fundamental inquiry : What 
that situation was ? Thus the History of a nation's Poetry is the essence 
of its History, political, economic, scientific, religious. With all these the 
complete Historian of a national Poetry will be familiar ; the national 
physiognomy, in its finest traits, and through its successive stages of 
growth, will be clear to him : He will discern the grand spiritual Tendency 
of each period, what was the highest Aim and Enthusiasm of mankind in 
each, and how one epoch naturally evolved itself from the other. He has 
to record the highest Aim of a nation, in its successive directions and 
developments ; for by this the Poetry of the nation modulates itself ; this 
is the poetry of the nation. 

"Ibid.. I, 1 8 1. 

" Ibid., I, 222 ; see also I, 33, and V, 47, where Carlyle says that 
Diderot must be regarded as a Frenchman of the eighteenth century. 



54 

"Such wc-ro llu- i)riinary essence of a true History of Poetry; the 
living principle round which all detached facts and phenomena, all sepa- 
rate characters of Poems and Poets, would fashion themselves into a 
coherent whole, if they are by any means to cohere. To accomplish such a 
work for any Literature would require not only all outward aids, but an 
excellent inward faculty : all telescopes and ol)servatories were of no avail, 
withintt tlu- sccinK eye ruxl the understanding heart." '" 

Carlylc was the first Juif^^Hsh critic of importance to adopt 
the bistorical method as an articulate part of his criticism. 
He can tliink of no man or Hteratiire apart from its age. In 
the J)kniic' Comedy, " All Christianism, as Dante and the 
Middle Ages had it, is emhlemed."'" The Elizahcthan era 
vvilh its vShakespeare, is the onlconie and flowerage of all 
which preceded it.-'* A study of Goethe's spiritual develop- 
ment implies a study of the " i)rogress also of his nation. "^^ 
'J'lie literature hefore and dm-ing the age of Voltaire, Diderot, 
Cioetlie, John.son, lUirns and Scott is recognized as a necessary 
factor in a just appreciation of these men. This statement 
holds good, even though, as we may remember, Carlyle had no 
niterest in the smaller problems of literary relationship and 
saw no profit in exploring streams of inlhience up to the 
tiniest source.-'- None knew better than he that the critic, or 
literary historian, will not arrive at a complete, or even an ade- 
quate understanding of his material until he has comprehended 
the total enviromneut of which literature is the final expres- 
sion. 

Nor did he overlook entirely the comparative method in 
criticism, though this receives less recognition than any of the 
other methods. Had he contimied a literary critic, deepening 
his interest in \n\vc literature as his knowledge of life expanded 
undoubtedly tarlyle would have given us many an admirable 

^^ Ibid., HI, 224. In Carlyle's notebook for 1827, among the works 
which he would like to write is mentioned " A History of English Litera- 
ture ; from llu' times of I'liauccr ; Warton's History of English Poetry 
would do something in the way of help, but nothing as a model. The 
men ought to be judged, not prated of ; and the whole environment of 
their talent, as well as the talent itself, set fairly before the reader." 
{Two Note-Books, 120.) 

"'Heroes, 90. '^Essays, I, 176. 

'"Ibid., 95. ="Cf. ibid., VI, 64. 



56 

illustration of this nuiliod, hcoaiisc Iio was kcoiily aware that 
no groat poet or pootry is related to a sini^le literature. Aiul 
yet his essays as they statul show that he rareh' introduces thi' 
literature ol" one nation uilhoni i;lanein^' at that ol another 
duriui;" the same period, lie eonipares the literary eoudition 
of (KM-uiany with that of I'Jimla.ud in the eit;-liteeuth century ;'-•' 
he compares the literary condition ol" Scotland in r.urns's dav 
with that in luii^land and iM-anci'."' Streams of philoso])hical 
and relii;ious iniluence run parallel in !''.nqland and on the con- 
tinent.-'* The romantic moxement ("arlyle from the first looks 
upon as luu'opeaii, due to intellectual tendencies and disttu-h- 
anccs breakini;' out not only in (lOrmauN' and l''nt;land, hut in 
France and Italy.-" The (liU:.-: and ll'iilcr periods in ( !er- 
nian literature, the storm and stress, are followed by similar 
manifestations in the literature of F.nqland.-^ The new criti- 
cal science itsell does not heloni;' to (ii'rman\ alone; "it is a 
luu'opean tendency, and springs from the geni"ral condition 
of intellect in JMiropi- "•"* Wherever ("arlNle turns to look at 
literary conditions his view is a broad one, always extending 
beyond the hunts o{ JMigland to other lands and peoples. I It- 
was too thoroughl)' steeped in (K^rmau thought, too sensitive 
hiiuself to alien inlluences, to maki" his hori/.on include less 
than the intellectual culture of hau-ope. 

Carlylo's idea of the nature and fimction of criticism is 
therefore comprehensive and profound. The main business 
of the critic is summi-d up in tlu- one word interpretation; all 
his other onici\s are boimd up in this. " ("riticism," savs C'ar- 
lyle, " stands like an interpreter bi'twecn the inspired and the 
uninspired, between the ])roplict and those who lu-ar the mel- 
ody of his \v(U-(ls, and catch somi- glimpsi- of their material 
meaning, but nndt'rstood not their (K'eper import."-'" The true 
critic looks within the poem, he does not si'ck to apply ri'ady 
made rules from without ; for he knows that only by this sub 
jective method can he arrive at the meaning of the poem, its 

•-•'//.;•,/.. 1, .|J, i8s. "//>/,/.. I, iSH, .'7.). 

•-•'//./,/., II, --6. -"Ibid.. I, .15. 

"//'/,/.. I, 186. -"/?;i(/.. 1. 4.t. 

-" //)/(/., I, 2^6, 45 ; IT. 170. 



56 

■' indivisible Unity." The true critic nnist be a psychologist, 
must have the power to decipher character, must be able to 
read the writing as an expression of the writer. He must 
possess the historical sense and have the rare faculty of 
putting himself into the position of the poet, into his age, his 
nation, his life, in order that he may understand the complex 
forces that have combined to mould the poet's life and work. 
Hut when he has done all this, the critic has perhaps his 
hardest task still to do. He must finally judge writer and 
writing in terms of universal principles of poetic beauty as they 
are unfolded in the cosmic process or are revealed " in the 
inmost Spirit of Man." The true critic, like the poet, is a seer 
and exercises the power of creation; for criticism "is in some 
s(M-t a creative art ; aiming, at least, to reproduce under a differ- 
ent sliapc the existing product of the poet.""" JLvery human 
being possesses in some measure the gifts and feeling of the 
poet;''^ but only he whose mind is richly cultivated can fully 
/, interpret the poet's meaning. "To apprehend this beauty 
of poctr)," Carlyle says, " in its full and purest brightness, is 
not easy, but difficult ; thousands on thousands eagerly read 
poems, and ;ittain not the' smallest taste of it; yet to all un- 
corrui)ted hearts, some effulgences of this heavenly glory are 
here and there revealed ; and to apprehend it clearly and wholly 
to acquire and maintain a sense and heart that sees and wor- 
ships it — is the last perfection of all humane culture."-'" The 
mind of the critic — that is to say — must be trained to relate 
tlie life of a poem to ])hilosophical principles, to measure the 
})oet's produce in terms of the highest generalizations reached 
by human knowledge. Criticism is thus in the final analysis 
not logical but intuitional in its methods;-" and though it deals 
only with serious literature, it is not didactic in its aims, ^be- 
cause it holds that literature teaches not by rules and precepts 
but by the communication of life.""* Criticism is thus not 
mechanical, but poetical. Lastly, though its criteria are 
subjective, criticism is not impressionistic in the latter-day 

"■ ""//'i</., I, 52. "^Ibid.. I, 181. 

"' Ibid., 11, 18. '* Ibid., HI, 172. 

•" //'/(/„ 1, 47- 



57 

sense, because the appreciation that it reaches does not rest j 
upon individual caprice, but upon " rules of universal applica- 
tion."-"* Criticism in spirit and purpose is scientific ; it en- j 
deavors to draw individual life and poetry into the circle of 
ultimate ideas.^" 

(b) Sources and Relations 

At the time when Carlyle was formulating his principles, a 
revolution in literary criticism had already taken place in 
Germany and was far advanced in England. Old standards 
were breaking down before new. Under the mighty impulse 
of Rousseau in France and Kant in Germany, a reconstruction 
had proceeded rapidly in all the ideals underlying philosophy 
and literature, as well as society, even before the eighteenth 
century had completed its third quarter. Winkelmann and 
Lessing were transforming ideas on art and turning the atten- 
tion of intellectual Germany to the literature of the past.^^ 
Then came Herder, followed by Goethe and Schiller, Richter 
and Fichte, all of whom did invaluable service in sweeping 
away old and worn-out theories and in erecting upon philo- 
sophical foundations a criticism at once appreciative, historical, 
and comparative. In 1798 the German romantic school, under 
the generalship of the Schlegels, raised its banner and declared 
independence in the realm of art. 

The movement grew and spread, until its quickening in- 
fluence became felt in England. Schlegel's Lectures on Dra- 
matic Litrature, as translated by John Black, were noticed in 
the Edinburgh Review for February, 181 G.''^ Three years be- 
fore, Madame de Stael's Germany had appeared in London in 
the original and was reviewed in the Quarterly. '-^^ Black- 
ivood's for October, 1823, remarks that "Madame de Stael's 
Germany is in every hand ; and Professor Schlegel's Lectures 
are at least in many." P>ut the new era in criticism started in 

»»/foiti., I, 33, 219. "" Ibid., I, 44. 5.3. 

" Winkelmann's Gesichichtc der Kunst dcs Alterthums, 1764; Lcssing's 
Ladcoon, 1766, and Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 1767-1769. 

"A French version was reviewed in tlie Quarterly for October, 1814. 
'"October, 181 4. 



68 

F.njjland several years before German criticism had j^^aincd 
even a sli^Iil foolhoUl. Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical 
Hallads was |)ul)Hshe(l in 1800. antl \yo\u 180S lo 1818 Cole- 
ridge delivered his lectures on literature in live series. In 
1817, with (he apiiearance of his Hido^raf^Iiia Litcraria, Cole- 
ridge heeaiiu- the iirsl of l''ni;lish ei'itics, and a pr(.>found in- 
terpreter of the new i)rinciples. Mis labors were ably sup- 
ported and sup]ileniented by the criticism of Lamb and Hazlitt, 
two i^\' (lie most soiisi(ive minds that ever g"ave themselves to 
(he aj^preciation of literature.'" In the earlier part of the 
ctn(ury also (he ,i;reat reviews were foundcil ; and these, wdiile 
often (K'stiuetive anil reactionary in (heir cri(ical tendencies, 
con(ribu(ed somediiii^- lo the new movement.*' Ry .1824, 
therefore, when Carlyle's translation oi U'ilhcliii jMcisfcr's Af>- 
f>rciiliccsliif^ was jniblished, romantic criticism was a settled 
thinj^ in Cermany and was rapidly gaining- ground in Eng- 
land under the leadership of Wordsworth. Coleridge, Lamb 
and 1 la/litt. 

(."hance comments in his early letters show that Carlyle, 
partly by (he ben( oi his own genius and partly by the directive 
force oi (he newer ideals, was nu>ving toward philosophical 
and historical cridcism, even before (.KX^the and the other Ger- 
mans ci>idd have nuich atTected his thought. In 1810 upon 
reading a ])ar( oi Uoiisseau's Confessions he remarks (ha( he 
vvouUl like (o see the remainder of it, in orilcr " to try, if pos- 
sible, [o connec( (he eharac(er *)f Jean Jacques wi(h my previous 
ideas oi human na(ure."'- lie proposes Madame de Stael 
(o Jane Welsh as a subject for an essay ;md asks: " What Is to 
hinder you from ilelineating your conception of her mind?"'*" 
In anodier le((er. commenting on U'illiclin Rfcister, he says: 
" 1 have accurately eopieil a s(riking por(rai( of Goethe's 
mind."" .Again in i8jj he (ells his hnnher (ha( (he essay on 

*" l.;iml)"s SlH'cinu'iis appeared in iSoS; lla/.litt's Lcctiiics on the Cltarac- 
Icrs of Shakespeare in 1817, his Lectures 011 the English Poets in i8i8, his 
Leetnres on the Comic Writers \n iSio, and a year later, his Dramatic 
l^iterature of lite . I,t,v of Elisabetli. 

"The Eiiinbiirj^h Ka'ieii' was estal>lislu-d in iSoj. the 0'""''"''.v i'> iJ^i'O, 
and lUackxcood's in 1817. 

*" E. Letters. 112. ** Ibiil.. 30S. 

"//..■</.. -'17. 



59 

the Civil Wars vvliirli lie tliinks of vvrilini;- will consider cer- 
tain (lislint;uishe(l actors in that drama for the purpose of cx- 
hibitinj;- ''some features of the national characler.""'' 'I'hese 
evidences of critical attitude revt'aled in random remarks 
show that the seeds were already sown in C'arlyle's mind and 
only needed nom-ishment from (lernuui thought in order to 
develop into a fruit fid system. 

We need j;'() no further than iMchte and Cioethe for the (Ger- 
man critical ideals to which C'arlyle was so lart^ely indebted. 
The "critical principles of ']'ieck and the Schleii^els," he himsi'lf 
said, derive from (loethe and Schilkr and "have been deduced 
patiently, and by long^ investij^ation, from the hij^hest and calm- 
est regions of Philosophy.""' That is to say, the new criticism 
laid its foinidation ui)on transcendental pliilosoi)hy as it oriji^i- 
nated with Kant and was developed by iMchte. Concernin};' 
this system we do not need to repi-at what has already been 
said in the second chapter, and it is oidy necessary to ])oint out 
that the fmal task of the critic is to discover by the aid of this 
philosophy the "divine idea" which the poet has im[)arte(l to 
his work.''' It is sii;"nilicant that to h'ichte Carlyle owes the 
best statement of the historical method in criticism. Accord- 
inj^ to the thought of iMchte, " each age, by the law of its natm-e, 
is differeti't from every other age, and demands a different 
representation of the Divine Idea, the essence of which is the 
same in all; so thai tlie literary man of one century is oidy by 
mediation and reinterpretation applicable to the wants of an- 
other."'** In this passage we fmd a clear recognition of the 
relation of the poet to his age, and of the development or 
change in form of the Idea from age to age — the very kernel of 
the historical method. This great princi])le, therefore, as well 
as the entire metaphysical basis of the new criticism we may 
trace to Fichte and the other Kantians. 

T'ut for its animating and sustaining spirit, f(jr its method 
in all departments except the ])urely philosophical, we should 
go to Goethe. In his writings there is a body of critical max- 
ims from which Carlyle derived invaluable and incalculable 

'"Ibid., 206. "//;/(/., r, 47-50. 

*" Essays, I, 246; 44. *" Ibid., 50. 



60 

support and for which he made the fullest acknowledgment. 
But even in the case of Goethe it is well to limit our search for 
borrowings to the criticism of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister's 
Apprenticeship, an interpretation which reveals the heart of 
Goethe's method and which Carlyle himself calls " the poetry 
of criticism."*" According to the method here employed criti- 
cism looks at a poem from the author's point of view, studies 
character in relation to its environment, seeks to penetrate to 
the original and organic idea of the work. It therefore regards 
a poem not in parts but as a whole, searching thus for its cen- 
tral idea, which it discovers by intuition and announces not by 
argument but by exposition. This criticism demands a critic 
who is an interpreter, who looks within with his own eyes, who 
can know a work by " the inward truth " of his own concep- 
tive power and in whom lies " a presentiment of all the uni- 
verse '■' which by the " harmonious touch of poetry is awakened 
and unfolded. "'*° We have here a group of principles which 
Carlyle accepted i}i toto and which he set up and defended as 
the true ideals of a sound and substantial criticism. In fact 
a short passage wherein Goethe describes Wilhelm Meister 
might be applied word for word to Carlyle in his critical 
capacity. " Wilhelm always wished," says Goethe, " to deduce 
everything from abstract ideas which he had arrived at; he 
wanted to have art viewed in all its connexions as a whole. 
He wanted to promulgate and fix down universal laws ; to 
settle what was right, beautiful and good: in short, he treated 
all things in a serious manner."'"'^ Carlyle's indebtedness . to 

*" Ibid., I, 52. In a letter written before Carlyle had composed his essay 
on the Stale of German Literature, Goethe notices how Carlyle in his 
introductions to German Romance keeps the balance between individuality 
and environment, and how he dwells on what is " specially characteristic 
of national tendencies." Goethe also point out that the " efforts of the 
best poets and rcsthetic writers of all nations have now for some time been 
directed towards what is universal in humanity." In his reply Carlyle 
says that these ideas command his entire assent {Corresp., 23, 24, 23)- 

"The criticism of Hamlet is to be found on pp. 190-191, 214-217, 223- 
227 of Vol. I; and pp. 12-25, Vol. II, of Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm 
Meister, 

^^ Meister, I, 241, In describing the new criticism (Essays, I, 43-44) 
Carlyle seems to be putting questions, with Goethe's criticism of Hamlet 



61 

Goethe and the relation of his doctrines to those preached by 
his master, may be seen with great distinctness throughout the 
Apprcniccship, not only in the passages relating to Hamlet, but 
in the hundred and one sayings upon art and literature scattered 
up and down this most suggestive and searching book. We do 
not therefore exceed the truth if. we say that Carlyle's main 
critical principles, derive, after Fichte and the transcenden- 
talists, largely from Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Goe- 
the. What he received from other sources only confirmed 
what he found there.-"'- 

This German criticism Carlyle describes as new and as en- 
tirely different from established or orthodox English criticism, 
past and present. 

" The grand tiuestion," he says, " is not now a question concerning the 
qualities of diction, the coherence of metaphors, the fitness of sentiments, 
the general logical truth, in a work of art, as it was some half century 
ago among most critics ; neither is it a question mainly of a psychological 
sort, to be answered by discovering and delineating the peculiar nature of 
the poet from his poetry, as is usual with the best of our own critics at 
present: but it is, not indeed exclusively, but inclusively of those two other 
questions, properly and ultimately a question on the essence and peculiar 
life of the poetry itself. The first of these questions, as we see it answered, 
for instance, in the criticisms of Johnson and Kames, relates, strictly 
speaking, to the garment of poetry ; the second, indeed, to its body and 
material existence, a much higher point ; but only the last to its soul." °° 

In Other words, the criticism which Carlyle set up and practiced 
is squarely opposed to the neo-classic eighteenth century theo- 
ries represented by Pope and Johnson ; and likewise to those 
advocated by the school of Jeffrey, high priest of the periodical 
criticism of Carlyle's own day. Professor Saintbury has de- 
scribed neo-classic criticism as a system of rules, applied ac- 

in mind. In a conversation with Eckcrmann, Goethe remarked approvingly 
upon Carlyle's criticism of German authors, to the effect that Carlyle had 
especially in view " the spiritual and moral kernal " — den geistigen und 
sittlichen Kern— as that which is really efficacious (Gesprdche, III, 123; 
of. ibid., II, 22, and Corresp,, 99 — " the Scot seeks to penetrate the work "). 

"* Carlyle of course owed a good deal to Schiller, but as Schiller's ideas 
in so far as Carlyle's shows their influence, rest upon the transcendental 
philosophy, it does not seem necessary to deal with them further than 
they have already been dealt with in the second chapter. 

^Essays, I, 43. 



62 

cording to good taste or good sense. " You never criticise 
anything," he says, " first in itself, but with immediate refer- 
ence to its Kind. You must please in the Kind, by the Quality 
— according to the Rule.""^* This method besides carrying 
with it the authority of great names, was developed in an atten- 
uated and gallicized form by such men as Blair and Lord 
Karnes, whose works were standard in Carlyle's student days 
at Edinburgh. References to this school of criticism in the 
essays are few and scattered, but sufficient to point very clearly 
to Carlyle's attitude toward it. In one place he says that 
Kames borrowed his principles from " Racine and Voltaire, 
Batteaux and Boileau."°° He refers to a neo-classic French 
critic of the late seventeenth century — Bossu — as one who 
could not measure Herder, Schiller, Goethe, " with his scales 
and compasses. "°° He says that William Taylor uses Sulzer's 
Universal Theory as his road-book to the temple of German 
taste, " almost as if the German critic should undertake to 
measure Wavcrlcy and Manfred by the scale of Blair's Lec- 
tures.''^''' Again in picturesque phrase he speaks of " that old 
strait-laced, microscopic sect of belles Icttrcs men, whose divin- 
ity was Elegance, a creed of h'rench growth."''"* From these 
scattered comments it is evident that Carlylc looked upon the 
old creed of criticism as a system of narrow rules, by which the 
externals, the garment of poetry, were measured. Its criteria 
were totally inadc(iuate to be of use for judging the new poetry 
which had a wholly different origin and made a wholly differ- 
ent appeal from that of the conventional eighteenth century 
literature. 

Carlyle's relation to Jeffrey and to the periodical criticism 
for which he stood was far more detinitely one of sustained 
and active opposition, for Jeffrey as editor of the Edinburgh 
Review was enthroned in power at the very time when Carlyle 
was preaching the new criticism by every means at his com- 
mand. In the passage quoted above he speaks of the criticism 
of his day as mainly of a psychological sort, which, being liber- 

''^ History of Criticism, II, 407-421. 

^^ Essays, II, 27. "Ibid., Ill, 235. 

""Ibid., I, 43. ''Ibid., Ill, 3. 



63 

ally interpreted, means the impressionistic criticism prevalent 
in the great reviews of the time, though the phrase was prob- 
ably written with Jeffrey in mind as chief among the sinners. 
Jeffrey's criticism, unlike that of most of his contemporaries, 
was pretty well formulated and rested upon certain psycholog- 
ical theories that he obtained from Alison, the apostle of 
" Taste. "^® In a review of Alison in the Edinburgh for May, 
i8ii, Jeffrey laid down some principles of aesthetics and criti- 
cism that underly his own critical ideals. The object of poetry, 
he said, is to give pleasure. The quality and worth of this 
pleasure are estimated by a select number of judges, necessarily 
few, who possess good taste, that is, who are qualified " by 
natural sensibility and long experience and reflection to per- 
ceive all beauties that really exist, as well as to settle the rela- 
tive value and importance of all different sorts of beauty."®'' 
Jeffrey considered himself as one of the judges. He appre- 
ciated literature in terms of his own taste, which he regarded 
as representative of the taste of cultivated people ; and he 
always seemed to be looking to these, as an advocate to a jury, 
for a sustaining verdict. The taste to which he appeals is de- 
fined as the capacity to perceive beauty ; and beauty, according 
to Alison's association theory, is a pleasurable feeling excited 
in us by objects which move us because, by the power of asso- 
ciation, they call up certain primary emotions. Whoever de- 
rives pleasure from an object, that object to him is beautiful. 
Each individual has within himself his own standard of beauty 
and hence of taste. Individual taste is not necessarily good, 
because the person who possesses it may have a very narrow 
range of associations. Only those whose associations are 
wide, whose experiences and sympathies are broad and deep, 
have good taste, because to them alone is beauty brought from 
a great number and variety of objects. Taste is therefore a 
relative term, the best taste belonging to him whose nature is 

^' The Rev. Archibald Alison's Essays on the Nature and Principles of 
Taste, published in 1790, v/as a standard work for nearly forty years. 
Carlyle several times refers to " Parson Alison " and his principle of 
taste, by which " we judge of poetry as we judge of dinner " {Life of 
Schiller, 99; Essays, I, 221 ; Froude, I, 304-305). 

*' Jeffrey's Essays, Modern British Essayists, I, 368. 



64 

most richly developed. The only reason why the lower beauty 
should give place to the higher, is " to assist in the cultivation 
of a finer morality.""^ From first to last the theory is empir- 
ical, sensational, associational, springing from the older psy- 
chology of Hume and Locke. It is English in origin and stands 
for what is commonsense and practical in criticism; and it rests 
securely upon a basis of morality. It differs by a whole heaven 
from the criticism of. Carlyle, whose ultimate standards are 
found in philosophy, not in psychology ; and whose method is 
intuitional, not associational. Carlyle habitually refers to abso- 
lute values, to a highest truth, or beauty, or reality, established 
in the deepest part of man's nature and independent of pleasur- 
able associations. With Jeffrey the competent critic is the 
judge of cultivated taste; with Carlyle he is the interpreter 
with a creative faculty and a seer's vision. 

In the hands of a catholic, discriminating and sensitively tem- 
pered critic, Jeffrey's principles might have been productive 
of much fine and enduring criticism, but as wielded by him the 
critic's rule became a schoolmaster's rod. Assuming the in- 
fallibility of his own taste and judgment, he tries to whip 
errant authors into line and he measures everything in the " I 
like it " and " I don't like it " manner. He brings the poem 
into his judicial presence, as it were, and appreciates it in terms 
of the number, variety and quality of sensations of beauty 
which it awakens in him. He marks and quotes passages for 
praise or blame. He judges parts and fragments, since he 
seeks impressions rather than ideas. Carlyle calls this the 
method of the " Negative School," because it is destructive in 
its results and contents itself with exhibiting violations of good 
taste. Its approach to a poem is external, and it always ap- 
plies a set of ready-made principles. In much of the criticism 
of Jeffrey, therefore, there survives the spirit and the letter of 
the eighteenth century neo-classic doctrine. 

In one important particular, however, there is some agree- 
ment with Carlyle. Jeffrey uses the historical method in a 
faint and tentative fashion and thus slightly anticipates the 
younger critic. Professor Gates in an essay on Jeffrey '^ 

" Ibid., 38. " Three Studies in Literature, 33-38. 



65 

points out that the disposition to take account of social condi- 
tions as influencing literature, first unmistakably shows itself 
in Jeffrey's essays in 1811, or about the time when Madame 
de Stael's book on Germany was so widely read. This fact 
suggests that in so far as Jeffrey used the historical method, 
he derived it from Germany through Madame de Stael, whose 
work he knew. Whether he actually borrowed from this 
source or from another his recognition of the importance of the 
method is slight and his use of it slighter. There is some 
evidence of it in the essay on Ford's Dramatic Works, for Jef- 
frey sees that literary influences extend from age to age, from 
nation to nation, and he sees also that there is a relation be- 
tween a literature and the social forces of the period in which 
it is produced. But the essay on IVilhelm Mcistcr contains 
the fullest statement of the historical method that Jeffrey ever 
made. He inquires into the causes which bring about differ- 
ences of taste in different nations, and he finds these to be two, 
namely, the lateness or slowness of development in some na- 
tions as compared with others, and certain accidental and de- 
grading conditions, such as kind of government, castes, etc., 
in one nation which do not exist in another. He concludes that 
the character of " original writers must have been modified 
to a great extent by the circumstances of the countries in 
which they were bred."""'' Beyond this general account there 
is little in Jeffrey's criticism to indicate that he placed much 
importance upon or found much interest in the historical 
method. To specific cases, such as in the essay on Ford, he 
applied it only in a limited measure, not at all with the wide 
grasp which characterizes Carlyle's handling. The fact is that 
literature was not for Jeffrey what it invariably was for Car- 
lyle, the highest spiritual expression of the life of a people. 
The primary condition of criticism implied in this view is that 
it should see a literature from its own side. And this is 
what Jeffrey's criticism never does. He looks at IVilhelm 
Mcistcr as a violation of English taste. He makes no serious 
effort to study German taste, or German ideas, least of all to 
study these as indexes of the character of the German people. 

"Jeffrey, Essays (M. B. £.), 105. 



66 

Consc'([ucnlly his posilion rc-niains restricted and insular, lim- 
ited to psychological considerations, and is never broad enough 
to admit ])rincii)les of philosoi)liical depth and range. Yet 
il is proper to point out that if Carlyle owes nothing to Jef- 
frey in the use of the historical method he was not quite the 
first to employ it in English literary criticism. There were 
faint traces of it in Jeffrey a decade before Carlyle began to 
write."'' 

''.rile editor of the }i({iiiburi:;h Rci'icw was for Carlyle the 
leading representative of periodical criticism current in his 
day. 'P!iis criticism was never very friendly to German ideas, 
and it was sometimes absurdly hostile, so much so that many 
an article aroused Carlyle's wrath and evoked from him well- 
nu-rilcd condemnation, couched in phrases both picturesque 
and pungent.'"^ In order that we may appreciate tlie difficul- 
ties in the way even of a critic with Carlyle's fighting spirit, 
ki us glance at three reviews of liis translations of IVilhcJm 
Mcisicr's .Ipprciiticcship, as examjiles of early nineteenth cen- 
tury periodical criticism. The first is in Blackivood's for June, 
1824,"" and was probably written by I^ockhart, who had been 
in Germany and who showed some interest in German litera- 
ture. r>egiiming with the assertion that he will give his opin- 
ion of Gocllie "as it is." the reviewer mildly i)raises the poet 
in a general way before he comes to ll-'ilhchii Mcistcr. In this 
work he condemns the critical dialogue " as so many impertinent 
interruptions"' which the reader is tc^ skip, whilst he follows 
tlie story of Mignon. 'i'he review concludes with a brief out- 
line of this story, interspersed with copious extracts which 
Carlyle would call " fragments." Such is a favorable review. 

"* Cartylf wi'll iimk'rstooil IIk' iiiiiid and ti'inpcr of JclTri'y and tlic spirit 
and method of Ids criticism, lie called JclTrcy " a ^ood man and l)ad 
critic" (Goethc-Corlyle Corr., 259) ; "a Inic newspaper critic on the great 
scale" (I'roiidc, II, 103); "I foimd," he says, "that essentially he was 
always as if spcakinR to a jury" (Rem., II, 253). In a well-known 
passage he calls JelTrcy's method the method of Moliere's maid, — " do you 
like it? Don't you like it? — a style which in hands more and more inferior 
to that sound-hearted old lady and him, has since grown gradually to such 
immeasurable lengths among us" {Ibid., IT, 271). See also E. Letters, ^^i?. 

"•See Essays, e. ^'., II, 186. ""Vol. XV. 619-632. 



67 

The essay by De Quincey in the Monthly Magazine of the 
same year ilhistrates a hostile attitude and is typical of i'^ng- 
lish opinion toward (loethe in 1824. After declaring that by 
the publication of this revolting book, Goethe's name must 
totter, and after severely and pedantically censuring Carlyle's 
translation, De Quincey opens his criticism with the remark 
that in the judgment of a novel there is one rule, " the golden 
rule of good sense and just feeling." He then turns to Goe- 
the's shockingly immoral creation and proceeds to exhibit its 
indecencies under the two heads of Gallery of Female Por- 
traits and History of Mr. Meistcr's Affairs of the Heart. 
Such is the manner in which that " cockney animalcule," as 
Carlyle duhhcd ]3e Quincey, reviewed a German book."'' Jef- 
frey's article in the Edinburgh for August, 1825, has already 
in part been referred to. It reveals the same method as De 
Quincey's critique though as compared with that, it is mild in 
manner and broad in scope. Yet Jeffrey cannot refrain from 
saying that Wilhelm Meister is " one flagrant offense against 
every principle of taste, and every just rule of composition.""" 
The book, he says, illustrates German extravagance and Ger- 
man vulgarity, mixed up with (ierman mataphysics. These 
wholesale condemnations the reviewer follows up by quota- 
tions tagged with likes or dislikes. Tt is no w(jndcr that Gar- 
lyle protests again and again against this style of criticism, a 
criticism by fragments and not by wholes,"" and everlastingly 
in terms of taste.''*' It is no wonder that he finds the Eng- 
lish reviewers' portrait of Goethe " resembling Goethe, as some 
unusually expressive Sign of the Saracen's I lead may resem- 
ble the present Sultan of Constantinople."''^ Jt is no wonder 
finally that with these reviewers and their reviews in mind 
he describes the critical period of his day as one of literary 
anarchy; " for the Pandects of J>lair and I>ossu are obsolete or 
abrogated, hut no new code supplies their place; and, author 
and critic, each sings or says that which is right in his own 
cyes."^^ His essay on the Stale of German Literature, for 

'" Do Quincey, Collected Writings, cd. Masson, XI, 226-256. 
""Jeffrey, Essays, 106. ""Ibid., I, 173. 

'^^ Essays, I, 54, 220, 226, 283. '''■'Ibid., I, 246. 

''"Ibid., I, 132, 221. 



68 

I)iit 



(•\;iin|»lc, is iml oiilv ;m cxposilioii of ( irniiaii iMJlirism, imii 
(I»l()iii;Ii<>lil .1 stdiil ;ill;nl< iipuii (lie iiicIIkkIs of |t-riic'\' ;iii(l llu' 
ii'vii'vvns, or upon ci ilii-isiit ;is ;i " St-ii-iuH- of Ni'i;;itioii."^'' 
'I'lic jiisliru'.'iliou for dwelling ;il soiiu- Irii,L;IIi upon l\\v ideals 
,111(1 iiiclliods ol lliis scliool (d iic!;.iliv'i' n'iticisiii lirs in tlio 
f.iit lliat (arlylr's own position as an innovator, his own sus- 
tanicd hattU' for tlic nrw iTiticisni. is tlu- nion- sharply l)ronj;lit 
lo vit'w, il wcclcailv disciM n the foiccs thai wt'ic allii-d a,i;ainsl 
liini. Ihit ('arlyii- did not li.^ht alone. Independent and fear- 
less as he was, he inarelu-d in tlu- ranks of men who followed 
the lla;.', ol roinanlic erilieisni, and he reeeived e\i'ii from the 
I'.nj^lish eonliiif^int a Uind of moral snpi)ort i;ieater than he was 
perhaps .aware of. 1 le did not eall the movc-menl romantie, 
hill he eleaiU' nndi rslood thai an ellorl was heini; made to re- 
eonslrnel erilieisni and that il was eommon lo ( lermany, h-iij;- 
laiid, I'Vanee and ltal\. " It is a I'lnropean lendenev," he says 
ol it, "and splines hum the i^eneral eondilion of intelleel in 
I'.nropi". We oniselvi\s have all, for tin- last thirty years, more 
or less distini'tlv fidt the neeessily of sneh a seienee: witness the 
ncfdeil into uhieh oni' I'dairs and Ilossns havi' silentlv falK-n ; 
oin' inereased and ine leasing' adniii-ation, not only of Shakes- 
spe.iri", hut of all his eontiMuporaries, .and of .all who hreathe 
an\ poilion of his spirit ; our eoulrovers\ whelhiM I'ope was a 
poet ; and so unieh vaj;ue ilforl on the part of our hesl erilies 
everywhere to express some still imexpressed idea eoneernintj' 
the nature of tine poetry; as il llu-y lelt in their hearts that a 
pure f;lory, nay a diyineness. heloiij;ed to it, for whieh they h.id 
jis yiM no name ami no intelleetual foriii."'^ 

" //)ii/., I, ,!,|. Il ilors nol seem <',s,siMili.\i lo llic l(>I(■^oill^; disoussiou to 
inchulr an iimilysis ol the iiiili\ i(lii;il ciilicism of Wilson, Scott, LocUhart. 
ntui (iilVoid. l'"or Wilson sec .Saiiitsliury's I'ssnys in l.itrtotutf. first scries, 
*70 ,l".l' t.nlvio lliouK.lil Wilson ;i "l;if liif.'.f,cr iiMii " 111. in lolTiry (l\Cin.. 
I, 7y). lull w.iiiliUK iIh- "tiiilr;il yjW." I'oi Svoll sec Sit ll'iillrr Sn'tl us «i 
Critic of l.itrtiiliii,- hv l!;ill, i,i.| i.|(<. riu- iuillior ooiuhulcs " lli;il .Scott 
WHS on tlic wlioli' .111 imiMcssioiiislii- I'lilic." l'"or l.iu'kliart sci" I. nun's Lift', 
csprvially \o\. II. iliaplors XIX ami \X. 1 .aiiR says that Lockluirt "had 
Rrcat povvovs. iiuuli Kiiowlrdnc clear iilcas, a Rood opjiortinuly, but the 
'Imp of the I'ci vi'i sc ' li;id di>minioii over liim." (iilTord is discussed in 
Saiiilhury's llisl. of Crit.. 111. j8o j8S. 

'* /'.vvii v\. 1. -i;;. (^n the Howies eontvovctsy. see also III. 71. 



69 



Tlu' rlVoil lo «-sl;iltlisli (•rilirisin iipdii ;i iii'w l(>iiii(I:il ion, by 
illvi'Sli};;ilin|;' (iisl priiuipKs, sticli ;is (lie ii:iliiir ol" "liiu- 
])Oc'lrv," was icprcsiiilcd in I'.njMaiid rliiclly 1>\ loni" naim-s, 
alrcatlv mentioned in the eail\' pari ol lliis elia])lei-, VVoi'ds- 
worlli, ( oleiidLH', lla/lill and I .anih. VVIiiK' il is impossible 
to point ont instances <d dinet intU-htedness, ('arlyU' nuisl 
Imvi' heiMi inllnenev'd 1)\' tliese eiities, Idr dmini; the period <d 
his essay writiii};' lu- was a lareliil reader ol reviews and had 
ail allcMilive ear I'oi- whatevei- was sjtoken in hterary eircli-s. 
And will) all his eontempl and c-\nieal inihilerenee, no man ol 
his (lav was nioii- cniioiis eonct'iiiini; his fellow ei a I tsnieii.'"^ 
At all events there is an inteicstin};' a;;rei'nient helweeii ("ar- 
l\le and the lomanlie erilies eonceiMlinijf several liisl piineiples. 
'J'o hej^in with llie\' wonid entloise, with considiTahly (iin\'reiit 
emphasis upon llu- liisl id them, the two leadini-" doelrines 
in C'arlyle's manilCsto, nameh, that poeli\' is to he jiidi;cd lioni 
within, and that it is to he jndjM'd aeeordin;-, to "nniveisal 
prineil)li'S wrilleii on the hearts and imaj^inal ion:^ (d all men." 
Willi them, as with ('arl\le, eritieism is lirst and last positive, 
and an idTort, Iherid'ore, not to eensnre hnt to inleipicl. ( ar 
lyle was not nioix- di'lermined than weic ( 'olerid!.;e .ind lla/lill 
to break awav from eritieism h\ rule and kind, aeeordnit; to 
the external melhoil. Aloni; with this new approach to llie 
material ol critici:;m then- went a new conce|)tion ol the nature 
and worth of poilr\. The held ol" poetry, said tliese critics, 
is not arhitrarilv restiich'd; the poel is tree to choose his sub 
jects where he will, if only ln' Ire.il Iheni in harmony with piin 
eiples nnivt'is.ai in their ;ii)plic;it ion. I'oelrx is the voice ol 
eomnion hnmanilv, and its .ipixal is not conlmed to men of one 
rank or iiation;ilit\ . In the critical ntlcrances ol lliese writei-s, 
poi'try is indi'cd regarded ;is life, or rather as the essence ol il. 
'i'lu'ii" f.iith in thesi.' hi^h mailers cannot be re<;;ii(led as diller- 
h\^ from ('arlyle's. ( )ne ;md .dl they believed in the mysle- 
rioiis ()ii,i;iii of poetry, as the product of a divine laculty sub 

■'" ( '.irlyli's u|piiii(>ii (>r Uicsc crilii's is JMinili.ii. I'or Wnrdswiii Mi hvc 
h'fin., II, J>)7 .|()<; : for CoIcridKO, hcsldos (In- r\y.U\\\ cli.ipli r in SlrrliHu. 
see I'voiiilr, I, i7<), aoS, 214, 23K ; ILisayx. II, iH.i; lli-nns, H.\ : lor ILi/lill, 
Essays. IV, -:K ; l-'roudc, il, 1 '><) ; Cmn-s. -.■cilli limrrsou, I. .|^, ; NoU- 
liooh-s, :ji,t: for Lamb, i'rDiidf, II, 17(1; Koii., I, <m ; II, i.)-;. 



70 

jcct to no laws Iovvcm* than itself; though none of them clung 
to this conviction with as much seriousness and consistency 
as (lid Carlyle. Terms such as imagination and genius occur- 
ring so frequently in Wordsworth and so continually in Cole- 
ridge and llazlitt, are eciuivalent to reason as uniformly used 
in Carlyle ; and all three names denote the higher creative 
power of the poet to see and body forth truth. 

Carlyle's differences from these critics as to both ideals and 
methods arise chiefly from his closer relation to the dermans 
and to his own larger view of society. His criticism reaches 
down into ]:)hilosophy : his principles have their roots in trans- 
cendental idealism. Coleridge is the only other English 
critic whose ])rinciples here and there seem to presuppose the 
Kantian system, and yet he nowhere succeeds in resting his 
criticism upon a definite philosophical basis. It follows that 
Carlyle alone is intent upon the idea, or, interpreted more liber- 
ally, the piu-pose or message of literature, its contribution 
toward the solution of the enigma of existence. In his criticism 
therefore he overlooks many important matters, such for ex- 
ample as the distinction between poetry and prose, which Cole- 
ridge took up and discussed with incoiuparable skill and insight. 
Again in Carlyle the proposition that poetry is life has a far 
wider meaning than it has in the work of the other romantic 
critics. With him poetry is not only the " breath and spirit of 
all knowledge " ; it is also the representative of man and society. 
It assumes for him a social character and significance, very 
faintly recognized by his contemporaries. The poet for Car- 
lyle is the representative man in whom all movements oi his 
time, the ciuestionings of the Zcit Gcist, are reflected, are heard. 
He it is to whom we look for universal trutli and for an inter- 
pretation of our age in the light of that truth. Carlyle there- 
fore places a far greater emphasis than do Coleridge and Haz- 
litt upon the historical method. Like Jeffrey both these critics 
touch this method in a few general remarks, but neither of 
them gives utterance to any desire or purpose to interpret litera- 
ture as an expression of the age in which it was created. '^'^ 

'"For Coleridge, see Literary Crilicisni. 189-191 ; for Hazlitt, see IVorks, 
V, 181. 



71 

They arc content, Hazlitt especially, to point out in a desultory 
fashion certain general influences of an age upon its literature. 
Farther they do not go. It follows that the biographical 
method in criticism receives no attention from these critics, 
for they regard literature — and it is their great glory — as some- 
thing apart, a work of art to be appreciated on its own merits 
and for its own sake. Whereas Carlyle, though he begins 
with this method, early comes to value poetry chiefly as an 
index of the writer, a reflection of his character both in itself 
and as related to its age. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lamb 
and Hazlitt remained critics of literature. Carlyle was drawn 
into biography and history and became a prophet. 



"I 



CHAPTER IV 

Carlyle's Relation to the Literature of Romanticism 

It appears from the analysis of Carlyle's literary theories 
and critical principles in the two preceding chapters that he at 
all times believed that a mind capable of creating literature 
must be healthy. By this he meant a mind finely balanced and 
self-dependent, through which truth shines as through a trans- 
parent medium, a mind with all its faculties working har- 
moniously together for one great object, the revelation in some 
form of the divine idea. In this article of his faith, as in so 
many others, Carlyle is at one with Goethe, who in a letter to 
him says that it has been " at last found most advisable to 
deduce the development of Morals as well as of /Ii^sthetics out 
of the whole Complex of healthy human nature."^'' In criticism 
Carlyle uses the word healthy in the sense he explains in his 
Edinburgh Address (1866), as synonymous with wholeness or 
holiness of mind. Such an intelject, he says, is "all lucid, and 
in equilibrium."- Such an intellect, moreover, develops its 
idealism out of actuality, not out of dreams; its belief rests 
solidly upon experience and always clings to facts and rejects 
fancies./ The truly creative writer is serious, he takes serious 
views of his art, and makes it an instrument for communicat- 
ing life, not for exciting a transitory pleasure. His appeal is 
to serious readers who, he says, ought to furnish minds 
'' active and watchful, not passive and somnolent."^ Reader as 
well as writer, if literature is to be worthy of its name and 
do its work, must be healthy-minded, for health with Carlyle 
is a word of wide compass and includes a theory of art. 

This attitude or faith places Carlyle in opposition, often in 

* Corres., 79. 

* Essays, VII, 195, Cf. Ill, 224. Of course Carlyle never accepts the 
converse of his doctrine, that all healthy minds are great, e. g., Scott. 

"Ibiil.. I, 130. 

72 



73 

harsh-toned and truculent opposition, to some of the most 
characteristic literary movements of his time, in a word, to 
many of the forms of romanticism manifested during the first 
quarter of the nineteenth century. He is not only against the 
literature of pleasure in the general sense, but he is opposed to 
a literature that he regards as proceeding from sham and false- 
hood, such as novels and plays. He makes no compromise 
with the whole tribe of cockneys and dilettanti, those apostles 
of the half-and-half and the artificial. He fulminates against 
the literature of skepticism and sickliness in which the pale or 
woe-struck brood of sentimentalists uttered their cries of 
despair; and he comes to regard himself as a prophet bewailing 
the flood of unhealthy books that pour from the press of a 
mechanical and unbelieving generation. Ikit lest it should 
seem absurd to discuss the hostility of one who was himself a 
romanticist, we will clear the way for further discussion of 
his position with a word on the romanticism of Carlyle. 

Carlyle is a romanticist in at least four senses.'* He is one 
in the first place by virtue of his opposition to the literature of 
the eighteenth century, at least to that part of it which adhered 
to classical standards. Though he has much to say of the 
literary conditions in Germany and England of that period, he 
regards the situation as limited to no country but as common 
to all. " Everywhere as in Germany," he says, " there was 
polish and languor, external glitter and internal vacuity ; litera- 
ture dwelt in a remote conventional world."'' The creative 
spirit in Germany, he declares, " had for above a century been 
almost extinct " ;° and " the past and present aspect of German 
literature illustrates the literature of England in more than one 
way. Its history keeps pace with that of ours; for so closely 
are all European communities connected, that the phases of 
mind in any one country, so far as these represent its general 
circumstances and intellectual position, are but modified repeti- 

* The terms romantic, romanticist and romanticism to designate a spirit in 
literature or a movement are rare in Carlyle's essays. They do not occur 
in the essays on Richter and on Novalis. See Essays, I, 45, 97; II, 170, 
276; III, 71, 161. ^Ibid., I, 184. 

'>Ibid., I, 18s. 



74 

tions of its phases in ever)'' other."^ Frequent parallels are 
drawn between Germany and England : the Utzes, Gellerts, 
Cramers, etc., of Germany rank with the Beatties, Logans, 
Wilkies and Glovers of England and Scotland. In such 
writers Carlylc professes to find '*' a certain clear, light, un- 
affected elegance, to the exclusion of all very deep or genial 
qualities."* Of a period earlier still he says that the Germans 
had " at best Opitzes, Flemmings, Logans, as we had our 
Queen Anne Wits; or, in their Lohensteins, Gryphs, Hoflf- 
mannswaldaus, though in inverse order, an unintentional 
parody of our Drydens and Lees."" His opinion even of 
some of the greatest of English writers of the eighteenth 
century is extreme. " Our English poet of the period was 
Goldsmith," he says ; " a pure, clear, genuine spirit, had he been 
of depth or strength sufficient."^" The poetry of Gray he calls 
a " laborious mosaic " in which life, feeling, freedom, are sacri- 
ficed to pomp and splendor. The prose of Johnson, though 
true and sound and practical, does not rise above a " prosaic " 
world." Even Burke is " a resplendent far-sighted Rhetori- 
cian rather than a deep sure Thinker."^- Gathered from 
various parts of the critical essays, these views point to a 
uniform attitude of mind. The literature of the eighteenth 
century everywhere was to Carlyle finished, correct and ad- 
mirably expressive of taste ; but it was likewise cold, conven- 
tional and shallow, dwelling remote from "the actual passions, 
the hopes, sorrows, joys of living men."^** Because, like the 
Schlegels or like Wordsworth in their several ways, he sought 
to liberate literature from this bondage of neo-classicism, 
Carlyle is always to be regarded as a romanticist.^^ 

In the second place Carlyle is to be classed as a member of 
the new school in so far as romanticism may be identified with 

'Ibid., I, 57. 'Ibid.. Ill, 228. 

''Ibid.. 42. ^^ Ibid., I, 185; cf. I, 42; n, 27. 

'^ Ibid., I, 185-6: cf. II, 26-27; VI, 52; Life of Schiller, loi. 

''Ibid., IV, 119. '''Ibid.. I, 185. 

" In view of hostile attitude alike in Germany and England at this 
period toward French literature, it does not seem necessary to dwell on 
Carlyle's individual opinions (see Essays, II, 167-170). 



75 

metaphysical, as distinguished from medieval, mysticism. 
With a mysticism that spent itself in longings for a new 
Catholicism or dwelt apart in a misty dream-world of fairies 
and hobgoblins, he had nothing to do. But if we take mysti- 
cism in the sense of " natural supernaturalism," as it undoubt- 
edly was taken by many writers, we shall find that Carlyle was 
a devout worshipper at its shrine. His analysis of German 
mysticism, both in the essay on the State of German Literature 
and in that on Novalis, shows that to him it was identical 
with German metaphysics. " The chief mystics in Germany," 
he says, " are the Transcendental Philosophers, Kant, Fichte 
and Schelling."^-"' With these thinkers, Carlyle, in so far as he 
was philosophically minded, was allied from the very first, by 
nature and by study; and to the end of his life he did not 
cease to have many moments when the world seemed to him 
a place of shadows, an abode of flitting phantoms whose real 
existence belonged to another sphere. To think and to feel 
in this manner was to unite himself with the new order of 
thought, not with the old. 

Carlyle is romanticist again in his attitude toward the past. 
His position, however, is independent. He turned frequently 
and regretfully to the past, more and more indeed as his own 
age seemed to him mechanical and spiritually dead ;^'' but this 
backward glance was not because he wished to revive the forms 
and customs, the external life, of a bygone age, nor was it 
because he thought his own time potentially unromantic. 
"The Age of Romance," he says, ''has not ceased; it never 
ceases." " Romance exists in Reality alone. "^^ His own 
time, however, seemed to him to reveal only few and fitful 
glimpses of such romance, and he therefore reverted to the 
past as the only home of actualities, the realm where real men 
were to be found whose lives, large and heroic, might serve as 
patterns to a generation of sentimentalists and skeptics. It is 
for this reason alone that he praises the novels of Scott ; they 
make the past seem alive. Carlyle in fact does not wish to 
take his reader out of the present so much as to incite him to 

« Ibid.. I, 62. 

" Cf. Ibid., IV, 26 ; Past and Present is a document to show this spirit. 

"Ibid., V, 131, 136. 



^ 
4 



76 

" wed that old sentiment," of the past " to modern thoughts."^^ 
His romanticism in this regard, therefore, may be described as 
didactic-biographical, — certainty quite a different thing from 
the extreme romanticism of some of the German School.^" 

Finally Carlyle is a romanticist in his rejection of form as 
an external and fixed thing, determined by rules. As this 
,\ matter has already been touched in the second chapter, only a 
brief mention is necessary here. The fullest declaration of the 
freedom of an artist to choose his own way occurs in the first 
Richtcr, where Carlyle asserts that while the "beaten paths of 
literature lead safeliest to the goal," genius after all has privi- 
leges of its own and selects its own orbit, which may be never 
so eccentric, if only it be celestial.-" A stronger statement 
to the same effect occurs in the Helena: "if an artist," he 
says, "has conceived his subject in the secret shrine of his 
own mind, and knows, with a knowledge beyond all power 
of cavil, that it is true and pure, he may choose his own 
manner of exhibiting it, and will generally be the fittest to 
choose it well."-^ Carlyle imposes one condition upon the 
literary artist — he must have a meaning to express, he must 
lend to his words the leaven of thought. And thus Carlyle's 
romanticism swings round to his literary theory. The writer's 
sole business is to see truth, fact, reality, whether in the past 
^ or in the present, and he is not to be fettered in his efforts by 
any arbitrary standards whatsoever. Inasmuch as the literary 
man of the eighteenth century did not take to his task in this 
spirit and with this aim, he found little favor from Carlyle.-- 

In order to understand more clearly how it is that Carlyle, 
though a romanticist himself, is to be found in out and out 
opposition to so much that is characteristically romantic in 
German, French and English literature, it may be well to 

"/bu/., I, 242. 

" Professor Beers points out that Carlyle preferred the collectivism of 
the past to the individualism of the present. Romanticism in the Nine- 
teenth Century, 382. 

'"Essays, I, 16-17. -'Ibid., I, 128. 

^ See Herford, Age of IVords^corth, XXIII, e. g., "Goethe founded that 
historical or relative jesthetic which measures the merit of a work of art not 
by its regularity but by its power of expression." 



77 

glance again at his position toward Goethe, who stood for him 
at all times both in literature and life as a " completed man."=^ 
Goethe is the embodiment of all the ideals which determined 
the attitude of Carlyle, whose interpretation of the German 
poet is largely that of a mind that has lived through the fever 
of doubt and discontent in all its stages and has come forth in 
"invulnerable health."-'' Regret for the past and despair of 
the present, as expressed in Gotz and Wertcr, finally give place 
to " freedom, belief and clear activity," as expressed in Wil- 
helm Mcistcr.'^ Goethe's mind in these struggles is typical, 
emblematic. He has passed from diseases common to im- 
mature, incompleted, or unhealthy minds, to a condition of 
mental equilibrium. He lives " in the whole " ;-" he is " king 
of himself and of his world.""'^ Hence he becomes " the 
Uniter, the Reconciler."^® Goethe's intellect lives and works 
now within the actual, his ideal rests " on the firm ground of 
human interest and business, as in its true scene, on its true 
basis."-" In the poetry of Goethe, says Carlyle, there is " no 
looking back into an antique Fairyland " ; the " mythologies of 
bygone days pass only for what they are ; we have no witch- 
craft or magic in the common acceptation"; and heroes are 
not brought from remote oriental climates, or periods of 
chivalry.-'" With Heine, Carlyle believed that Goethe's voice 
scattered the whole brood of ghosts, owls and ravens back to 
the castles and old bell-towers of the middle ages.^^ What 
Goethe has to say is valuable therefore for present-day life, a 
health-restoring medicine for the fevered condition of romantic 
Europe.^- 

The romanticism that Carlyle sets his face against is in 
every instance a romanticism that upholds ideals contrary to 

"^ Essays, IV, 49. ^ Ibid., IV, 175. 

-*Ibid., IV, 172. "^Ibid., I, 19s. 

"-^Ibid., I, 210. *»/btrf., I, 55. 

^Ibid., IV, 50. '^Werke, V, 246, 

"" Ibid., I, 279. 

" Of course I do not mean to imply that Goethe's position toward ro- 
manticism is identical with Carlyle's. I mean only to say that Carlyle 
found in Goethe justification for his own opposition. See Bielschowsky, 
Life of Goethe, III, 143 ff. 



78 

those to be found in ll'illichii Mclstcr, or in tlio writini^s of 
Goethe's maturity. But though he dcrivod support and (hrec- 
tion from Goethe, his attitude was independent because it was 
temperamental, as is evidenced not only in one or two notable 
opinions in the early letters, but in the entire literary develop- 
ment of Carlyle as described in our first chapter. The early 
evidence comes out in connection with two men who stand as 
prophets or forerunners of the romantic movement in France, 
Rousseau and Chateaubriand. In 1819 Carlyle expresses dis- 
gust with Rousseau's Confessions and declares that the book 
"should teaeli a virtuous I'.riton to be content with the dull 
sobriety of his native country. •'•' Three years later he speaks 
of "the nonsense of .Itala" and of "the rude, melancholy 
vaslness oi that famous work."''' These early opinions, it may 
be added, are likewise fairly typical of all that Carlyle had to 
say of the movement in France. He did not much concern 
himself with b'^rench thoui^ht and literature, until he took up 
\'ollaire. when his interest led him into the field of history 
rallier than of literature, and expressed itself in the Diderot, 
the PiaDiond M ccklacc, the Mirabcan, and finally in the great 
I'vciich Revolution. Before the period of the essay on Vol- 
taire (1829), there is little to indicate more than a diffused 
ami conventional hostility to the literary and critical standards 
of b^rance — a hostility in which are heard echoes of the Ger- 
mans and of Coleridge and Wordsworth. In the preface to 
Gcrtnan Romance, Carlyle alludes again to the " thundery 
regions of . I ta/a, '"■'■' and in the introduction to Tieeh there is a 
clear recognition of literary atTairs in France.-'" In the J\}1- 
tairc wdiich appeared two years after Hugo's Croniiu'ell (1827) 
and a year before his Ilernani (1830). Carlyle expresses some 
sympathy with the literary revolution then proceeding on the 
other side of the channel. The French are, he says, " in what 
may be called the eclectic state ; trying all things, German. 
English. Italian. Spanish, witli a candour and real love of im- 
provement, which give the best omens of a still higher suc- 

^E. Letters, 11 J. "//'i',/.. I, 229. 

"ifci(/., 215. '"//)!(/., I, 246. 



79 

cess."^' The interest here is friendly and not hostile, for 
Carlvle thinks that JM-anoe now " feels herself ealled to a more 
grave antl nohler destiny "' than she had shown in the previous 
ae-e. the aee of \\)ltaire and the classicists. But the interest 
is already late, and Carlyle is drifting from criticism into 
prophecy. From what we know of his opinion of German 
and English romanticists, however, we run no risk in affirming 
that had he discussed Victor Hugo or George Sand, he would 
have condenuied them and the spirit which they represented as 
heartily as he condenuied Byronism in England.'"* His few 
later references to Chateaubriand and Rousseau show that his 
attitude toward these men remained what it had been. Sartor 
RcsartKs may indeed be taken in one aspect as an indignant 
refutation of Rousseauism, a declaration that society will cast 
ofi* its old customs only to assume new ones.^*^ In the thought 
of these revolutionary writers Carlyle, early and late, pro- 
fesses to find a rosepink sentimentality, and he turns from 
them just as he turns from the romanticists in Germany and 
England. 

Toward the romantic movement in Germany his position is 
more clearly defined. Tiie literature of the storm and stress 
period excited his aversion, and he would gladly have swept 
it all into the dust-heap of oblivion. It was created and 
represented, he thought, by the Got;:: and JJ'crtcr of Goethe, 
and the Robbers of Schiller. It included " the Sentimentalists, 
the Chivalry-play writers, and the Power-man," and w^as a 
literature of desperation and disease.*** With the new school 
as a separate and organized movement, of which Tieck and 
the Schlegels w^ere high priests, Carlyle had a curious, and in 
some respects a sympathetic interest ; and he was w^ell aware 
of its various manifestations in the literature of the period.''^ 
He wrote essays on two members of the school, Werner and 
Novalis, he wrote introductions to the romance of Tieck, 
Hoffmann and Fouque, and he discussed in a full-length paper 

^nbid., II, I/O, ^^Froiidc, III, i77- 

^Sartor, 40. See also Essays, VI, 54; V, 28; Heroes, 172-173. 
*»Cf. Essays, I, 58, 183, 189, 273; IV, 169. 
"Cf. Ibid., I, 46, 1 01, 246. 



80 

the Nibelungen Lied, the medieval poem perhaps most lauded 
by the romanticists. He asserts that the principles of the 
new school were derived from the transcendental system ;*^ 
and in so far as they were he of course finds them nourishing. 
From this philosophy the romanticists drew their fundamental 
doctrine of the identity of poetry and life — a doctrine upon 
which Carlyle's own poetic creed is erected. Poetry, said they, 
is an expression of the spirit of man wherever it may be 
found, in ethics, religion, politics, education. All human in- 
terests culminate in poetry, and a writer's literary creed must 
be broad enough to take in man's social relations.** Inter- 
preted liberally, this belief commanded Carlyle's support, but 
his application of it to actual social conditions was widely 
different. 

In fact Carlyle did not follow the movement beyond the 
sphere of philosophical principles. His introductions to Tieck, 
Hoffmann and Fouque show an indifference to their work, or 
at most a very lukewarm interest in it.** Though these writers 
belonged to the new school, Carlyle does not attempt to relate 
them to it, and there is confessedly something second-hand in 
many of his judgments upon their books. He has not read 
Tieck's William Lovell, a production highly typical of certain 
tendencies, nor does he even mention such out and out ro- 
manticists as Brentano or von Arnim. He is interested in 
Friedrich Schlegel not as the author of Lucinde, another book 
steeped in romantic extravagances and not mentioned by 
Carlyle, but as the interpreter of transcendentalism and as in 
some sense a religious mystic.*^ As for Werner, Carlyle con- 
fesses that he seeks " chiefly for his religious creed,"**' and 
looks for some glimmering of truth through the confused 
jungle of Werner's writings.*^ We cannot think of Carlyle as 

^ Ibid., I, 44, 246. 

"See Brandes, Main Currents, II, 68; Beers, XIX Century, 135. 

** Essays, I, 242-3, 249, 261-2. 

*® Characteristics was in part inspired by Schlegel's Philosophische Vor- 
lesungen; see Essays, IV, 28, 31. ^^ Ibid., I, 88. 

" The Catholic tendencies of Werner, of the younger Stalberg and F. 
Schlegel, Carlyle nowhere sympathizes with, but he rather lamely tries to 
explain them; see Essays, e. g., I, 123; also I, 31, loi, 118. 



81 

sympathizing with the excesses into which the younger roman- 
ticists descended. He who speaks of the dissolute Hfe, the 
"Asiatic reverie"*^ of Werner, and of the jack o'lantern per- 
sonages in his dramas ;'*® he who in spite of his Hking for the 
metaphysical mysticism of Novalis, can yet speak of that 
typical young romantic dreamer as passive, as coming before 
us " in a sort of Asiatic character,"^*' would be little likely to 
find pleasure in the wilder flights of these and other members 
of the school. What in Novalis and Hoffmann was Rosen- 
schein and Purpurglut to Heine^^ would be charmed moon- 
shine and rosepink bedizenment to Carlyle. It was not in him 
to share in the desire of the romanticists to hold a festival of 
the senses, to play fast and loose with the ego, or to disin- 
tegrate the spiritual self into a hundred fantastic or grotesque 
shapes. Carlyle held fast to the unity of the higher self. His 
romanticism kept to the deeper channels of thought and was 
not drawn into the eddies of psychology or the muddy flats of 
pathology, as much of the German romanticism came to be. 

How strictly Carlyle's interest is limited to the interpretative 
side of romanticism is shown in his treatment of Goethe's 
Helena and Mdhrchen, Werner's dramas, and the Nibcluiigeii 
Lied, in one and all of which, though romantic in different 
ways, he looks for " meanings.""- Perhaps his attitude is no- 
where more strikingly displayed than in his contrasted handling 
of the Heldenbuch and the Lied. The first, Carlyle calls a 
shaggy wilderness and enchanted wood where haunt " a chaotic 
brood of Fire-drakes, Giants, and malicious turbaned Turks."^^ 
The Lied itself, which Heine says was once all the talk of the 
romantic school,^* is a " fair garden of poesy," a " free field 
open for legitimate perennial interests," in which the marvels 
are few and there is " a real, rounded, habitable Earth."^' 

*'Ibid., I, 123. ^Ihid., II, 227. 

** Ibid., I, 109. "Heine, Werke, V, 302. 

^^ Essays, I, 98, 128; III, 129; IV, 222. With the symbolism of Werner 

Carlyle has no sympathy (I, 109). With that of Goethe he has what I 

should call but a feeble sympathy. Cf. I, 171, 225. Though a symbolist 
himself in the transcendental sense, he was generally averse to literary 

symbolism. ^ Werke, V, 315. 

"Ibid., Ill, 127-129. ^^ Essays, III, 129-130. 



82 

I Tli;i( is (i) say, in so far as rinuanticism socks io hriiis;- the iilcal 
clown to the actual, not to lift the actual \u{o a lunar world of 
fantasy and t;rotosciucry. Carlyle will be found in hearty agree- 
ment with it, for then its mission corresponds exactly with his 
idea i'>i the mission o\ all literature. 

The romantic movement in I'jii^land was nearer to Carlyle, it 

\ was ereati\'e rather than interpretative, it steei-ctl clear of tran- 
scendentalism, and it did not. except inelTectually in Words- 
worth and .Shelley, attempt to relate itself as a constructive*^" 
force [o life and sin-ietN. I'or all these reasons as well as for 
reasons o\ temperament, Carlyle took a far more iletermined 
stand a.^ainst Kui^lish romanticism than he did against Ger- 
man, llis position is showti in scattered remarks upon nearly 
all ot (he chiet acti>rs in the new drama, hut it is most evident 
in what he has to say oi Scott and r)\ron. wlu^se works he 
freqnentl\' refers to as the leading proihuis of the " Moss- 
trooper and Satanic Schools."'"' 

Ne\t to (loethe and r>urns, r^ron. as has been saiil, was the 
poet who most drew the attention of Carlyle. lie is referred to 
again and again in the Jissays. and his brilliant and wayward 
career is the \vearisomel\ iterated text I'or a lUveu sermons. 
Carlyle was fascinated by r>yron's genius, h^xnule quotes an 
extract ivoiw a letter to Miss Welsh, in which Carlyle laments 
in a highly emotional strain the death of the poet and speaks 
(vf him as the "noblest spirit in haux^pe," who had sunk before 
his course was half run.'' .\ few years later (iS^^o) he writes 
to Napiei'. then editor of the luiinbiiriih Ixi^i'icw, otYering an 
essay on r>yron as soon as Moore's second vohuue of the Life 
shouUl appear. Carlyle urges the matter again after two 
years, but Napier, fearful of what Carlyle might say, turned 
the subject over to Macaulay.""' Thongh we have lost what 
probably wmdtl have been a notable contribution to the stud\' 
oi P.yron and certainly a l"arl\le document oi extreme interest, 
we can be pretty certain from numerous incitlental opinions 
what directicMi the proposed review would have taken.'*"'' Some 

""7;-h/.. l\'. 160. ^'FroiuU'. I. 173. 

^^SheClicrd, I, 74-75, 104. 

'"'In his second letter to N;ipioi-. Carlyle says of l>yron : " tlis fame has 
liceti very ,i;reat, l>ut 1 see not liow it is to endiue : neither does that 



of the (ipiiiioiis in tlu' earlier essays testily to an interest tem- 
pered with s\nipalli\. In the introihietion to 'Tieek. C'arlyle 
sa)s thai "our own nohle anil hapless ilyron perished from 
anioiii;' us at the instant wlien his dehveranee seemed at liatid.""" 
In the niirns \\c asserts that " r>\ ron has a poet's soul, and 
strives towards the Inrmite and the Ivternal."'" Such favor- 
able comments are all alike in one r(.\spect they express C'ar- 
hle's judi^nient that Hyron's life was ineomiWete and that he 
died before he could solve the eniL^nia of existence as it was 
solved by (u)ethe in W'ilhchii Mcislcr. Unlike Schiller and 
Goethe. I'.yron did not survive his storm and stress period, 
but perished while passing;' through it."- That he was des- 
tined to C(Mi(iner hiniself and his world. C'arlyle seems to have 
had no doubt; as is ])roved b\ his tre(|uent praise n\ jiyron's 
poetical endowment and by his sii;nilicant critical remark on 
the last of Hyron's poems, Hon Jiiaii, of which he says thai 
it is, especially the latter part of it, perhaps " the only thint:^ 
approach ins;- to a siiiciTc w(»rk. he ever wrote."'' i''xcept (loc- 
thc, Hyrou was the only one of his contemporaries of whom 
Carlyle s]ioke with so nuicli favor. 

r>ut while be was deeply moved by the tra,i;ed\- in lUron's 
life and work, and rellecled reL;'ret fully upon what the poet 
niij^i'ht have accomplished. C'arlyle's opinion of his poetr\-, of 
Ryrouism that is, rarely varied from what he wrote as early 
as iSji in a review of Joanna Uaillie's Metrical l.ri^nids. 
Though he does ni>t there mention the poet by name, he unmis- 
takably refers to Byronism in such phrases as ruffiaus, oriental 
g'orjicousness, diseased melanchoK. frenzies of despair, etc. — 
all manifestations of the Urilish Werter. Later opinions are 
more extreme, and sometimes violent, but to the last they in- 
dicate that r>yron was the prototype of those l'aii;lisb senti- 

inakc him i;''^"'''. No i;i'iiiiiiK" productive llmunlit w.ts ever reve.iled l)y 
liiiu to niankiiul ; iiulecil. no clear iiiulistorted vision into anytliinj^;. or 
picture of anytliing ; l)ut all had a certain falsehood, a l)rawling, theatrical, 
insincere character." 

""//))■</., T. 244. '" fbiJ., 1. 50, 211, J13; IV, 188. 

"' //'/,/.. U, 50. "■'//'/,/.. ]l, II. 



i 84* 

lucMitalisls who (lid iiol riiKT.L;v from tiickly sclf-conscioiisncss 
into licallliy uiiroiisciousiu-ss of si'lf.'"' 

If r.yroii lurscd the present, Scott uttered rep^rcts for the 
past ; and tlu' aullior of }i'(n'crlcy succeeded n<i better than (hd 
the author of Chihic Harold in investing; liis work with trans- 
cendental meanings. Carlyle early ])oiuted out the relationship 
between (liUz and Scott's rcMuances, pnxso and metrical, and he 
invariably classed Scott's work with the chivalry drama of 
Goethe.'"' With these general opinions the essay on Scott is in 
full agTcemeul. Sir Waller's entrance into literatiu-e, Car- 
lylc vSays, was sFuf^nlaily fortunate. Il was "an a,t;e fallen 
into spiritual lau<;uor, destitute of belief," an at;e in which 
"a liavU>v was the main singer.""" Inevitahl)' the man who 
i-arrii-d the " readi-r hack to roui^h strong- times, wherein those 
maladies of otus had not yet arisen," was hailed with warm 
wi,-Ict>me and hccamr the " sonj^-siuj^er and pleasant tale-teller to 
r.ritain and l'"nroiH', in the hej^iiuiini,' of the artilicial nineteenth 
century.""^ I'.ut since "literature lias other aims than that 
of harndessly anuising indolent languid men," the sick heart 
of the a.i;e will lind no healint;- in the romances of Walter Scott, 
1 le w ho has no messai^e to j^ive cannot be trusted to cure the 
fever of the soul.'"* 

JMtim Sc()tt, out and away kinj;- of the romantics, as Ste- 
venson named him, the transition is easy to the romantic drama 
and to lictiou in general ; for Carlyle ret;arded the Waverley 

"'Last Woidx. i-'S; lissays, \, iSy; 11, lo ii, --48; 111, js ; IV, 177; 
VI. S-\- 

•"CollrftiiHi-tt. 1)1 ; /:.v.v</.vi-, I, ^7,\. iS.r. IV, t6o: VT, 53. 

'"Ibid.. VI. 5-'. '"//'/./.. \I, .i«. 

""It docs not setMu necessary to conuncnl specially on Carlyle's opinion 
of Keats, Sliellcy, Wordswortli, Coleriilne. IlazliU anil De Quinccy. For 
Keats see luirns, 11, 18; ]-ri>uth', III, 384. lastiiiK a glance at Keats, 
Carlyle says that "Johnson was no man to he killeil by a review" (Es- 
says, IV, 114). For Shelley see 1\', jS (also Uazlitt). and Kcni.. II, 293; 
for Coleridiie (C'arlyle every wlieie regards the later Coleridge not the 
author ol I'lir .liu-irnt Murim-r ai\d Cliristnlu-I), see Life of Schiller, 100; 
Stcrliiij:, eh. \' 1 1 1 ; lor Wordsworth see Life of Schiller, 153; Essays, 
1, 181; l\eiit.. \'o\. 11, -'o; .!oi). Note the phrases, "poor, moaning, mon- 
otonous Maepherson" (Essays, III, 242); "slight bravura dash of the 
Jair tuneful Hemcns," "truthful severity of Crabbe's style" (Ibid., 
IV. io»). 



85 

Novels as only a Iuj^Iut s])cTic-s of lln' wliolc {j^cmis callcf] litera- 
ture of aimisenienl. Mr did not rare for plays and lie raiely 
went to llu' (lieali-r. When he was Iranslatinjj^ IVi/liclm 
Mcislcr in iSj^^ he vvrole in dis^^iisl to a friend of the endless 
talk in lli.il hook abonl i)layers and their sorry ])asteboard ap- 
paralns ; and evc-n in his preface he did not shrink fioni icfer- 
rin<^' to the " I'verlaslinj^' discpiisilions ahonl pla\s and play- 
ers.""" In the same year he n-eords llial he eoiild not read 
a sinjjfle play of tlu- old dramatists — " Massin^er, lU-ainnont 
an<l I'delcher etc. — to an end without dis^'ust."^" This feelinj^' 
naturally deepens into loathing, when he comes lo consider 
the I'omantic- drama of the niiu'lt'enth ci-ntnry, as he does in the 
essay on (irniuiii I'laywriyhls. 'rhron.^honl the discussion 
there runs tlii' distinction between the dramatist and the play- 
wright, hi'foi-e referred to. The lattt'r is the lar};-el for (!ar- 
lyle's shari)est sarcasms. Mis attitudi' toward his subject is 
aniusinjj;'. Me is entering' a "low province" in the interest 
of a " soimd study of h'oreij^n Lit(."ratm"e " ; lu- confesses that 
his knowledj^e of his j^round is " in the hij^hest deii^ree limitetl," 
and that be will take "one brief shy jji'lanct' " and "leave it, 
probably for many years."'' I le turns away accordin}.;ly with 
the concluding remark that he wishes to wander over the 
" Elysian Fields of ( ierman Literatmt-," not to watch " the 
gloomy discords of its 'i'artarus."'''- I le brushes aside the 
whole tribe of (jrillparzers, Klingenianns and Milliners as so 
many poor mechanical prosaists, who possess no ])hilosophy of 
life and have no word of wisdom. Kotzebne is elsewhere 
picturesfjuely described as "a lifeless bundle of dyed rags.'"'" 
The ICnglish playwrights — the " Knowleses, Maturins, Shiels 

""/i. Lcllcrs, 286; lissays. I, 225. 

'"' Note-IiooUs, 32. It is .safe to say (hat (.'arlyle cared little for any 
dramatic writers except Sha]<e,spcarc, Scliillcr and (]oclhc. Sonic of his 
early opinions of Schiller's dramas show the exlrava^ance of immature 
judKincnt (see IJfe of Schiller, 131, i.i-;, is.i)- He read Moliere, hut lie 
says th;it " l'"rrincc never rose inio tin- siiIicm' of S<liill<-r even in (he <I.iys 
of Corne'illc " il.ifr of Srliiilcr. 131). This cirly opinion is supported 
by later jiidfnirnts (lixsays. 1, 1.=;; II, 167). Sec his rcni.irks on I .ope de 
Vc^a and Calderon (llislory of Lilfrdliirc, i\>) \2<)). 

" Bssays, II, 88. '■'Jhul., II, 118. 

'^ /hid., Ill, 2.1s ; ef. VI, 32. 



86 

and Shees " — are of the same sort, though their popularity is 
a little run out and they stand forlorn " like firs on an Irish 
bog."^* 

Carlyle would have been glad to banish romantic novels to 
a place more forlorn than an Irish bog, had it been in his 
power to do so. Their name was legion and their baleful in- 
fluence penetrated everywhere. To guide us to his position 
toward the fiction of his day and earlier, we have nothing 
better than a paragraph in the preface to German Romance. 
wherein the opinion is both early and characteristic. The 
novel is the work, he says, not of an artist but of a manufac- 
turer, and is therefore " among the simplest forms of composi- 
tion." Though there are a few novelists of high order, " a 
few Poets " among them, there are " whole legions and hosts 
of Poetasters," who in Germany and elsewhere have made the 
sentimental novel and the Gothic romance a " mountain of 
falsehood."'^'* 

Carlyle regards the novels of Goethe and Richter as the 
product of poets, and he excludes these from the condemna- 
tion he was so ready to bring down upon the rest. His opin- 
ions of their work in fiction are especially valuable as show- 
ing how he considers it hardly at all from the point of view 
of what we should call legitimate novel-interest — plot, charac- 
ters, situations — but for entirely different reasons. " The two 
Books named Novels," he says of the two parts of Wilhelm 
Meister, " come not under the Minerva-Press Category, nor 
the Ballantyne-Press Category."^" Not for their " romance 
interest," but for their philosophy, their literary criticism, 
their varied and deep thoughts on religion and life, are these 
celebrated German fictions esteemed." It is the same with 
Richter, except that in Richter Carlyle finds also a congenial 
humor which he describes with a good deal of minuteness. He 
does not like what in Jean Paul's day constituted the " novel 
interest " of these strange pieces, their oriental extravagance, 
their fantastic exaggeration, overflowing abundance and lyrical 

'Ubid., II, 86. 

'° Ibid., I, 229. The separate introductions, especially to Tieck, Fouque 
and Hoffmann, reveal no liking for their fiction. Cf. I, 32. 
'"Ibid., I, 286; cf. I, 198. "^ Ibid., I, 225, 226, 284. 



87 

diffuseness; but he likes the Hfe in them, their never-omitted 
meaning.''* < 

Carlyle's firm and unchanging insistence upon reahsm in 
art''° explains his faint and his sometimes less than faint sym- 
pathy with two English novelists of the eighteenth century, 
Fielding and Sterne, to whom we may turn for a moment in 
passing on to the romantic fiction of the next century. Field- 
ing's Tom Jones seems to have stood to him as the highest 
type of what he calls " our common English notion of the 
Novel. "^"^ Sterne he places higher than Fielding, if we may 
judge from the more frequent and more favorable notices of 
him. The humor in Tristram Shandy awoke answering 
echoes in Carlyle's nature and he warmed to Uncle Toby and 
the other members of that eccentric family." 

It was the English romantic fiction of a later day that came 
under Carlyle's censure, a censure sometimes ironical, often 
savage, but always vigorous and earnest. He divides all fic- 
tion of this type into three or four groups, whose names recur 
often in his criticism — the Minerva, the Ballantyne and the Col- 
burn novels (so called from the name or proprietor of the 
press), and the fashionable novels. Lowest in their kind were 
the works of the Gothic school, those of Mrs. Radcliffe, Mrs. 
Shelley, Monk Lewis and Beckford, together with Tom and 
Jerry, a dramatized version of Pierce Egan's popular cockney 
production.**- A little less low, perhaps, were the fashionable 
novels, of which Disraeli's Vivian Grey (1826) and Bulwer's 
Pelham (1828) were the most shining and popular examples. 
These fictions were all the rage when Carlyle was writing Sar- 
tor, and he unmistakably refers to them as the sacred books of 

''Ubid., I, 267, 265; cf. II, 183-4. '"'Ibid., IV, 58. 

^ Ibid., I, 231. It is in this sense that the word novel is applied to 
Richter. For Fielding, further, see I, 229, 284 ; IV, 58. 

^^ Ibid., I, 15, 237, 266; II, 20, 167. Cervantes was a favorite of Car- 
lyle's; he calls him "the purest of all humorists" (I, 15). Rabelais he 
does not appear to have liked (I, 261) ; Montaigne he did (I, 15). Rich- 
ardson he considers sentimental, and he dismisses Goldsmith with a 
casual comment or two (I, 22^, 42, 185 ; see also on Richardson and 
Defoe, II, 17). 

'"Ibid., I, 32, 261; II, 12-13; III, 6s, 242; VI, 70. V' 



88 

dandies who haunt Ahnacks, a " Jewish temple " where the 
Icadin^c;- prcaclu-r and teacher Pclham holds forth. '^^ Still 
liif^iKT up, but not entering the ranks of literature, were the 
Waverley Novels. Hut even Soolt, when he attempts the 
heroic, " which is but seldom the case, falls almost at once, 
into the r()se-])ink sentimental — descries the Minerva Press from 
afar.""' ( )u all sides Carlyle regards the novelists of his day 
as dealing- with sham and unreality, and he deliberately brands 
their work as false. In his essay on Biography he says signifi- 
cantly that the " highest exercise of Invention has, in very deed, 
nothing to do with h'^iction ; but is an invention of new Truth, 
what we can call a Revelation."**" With invention in the sense 
used in iniaginalive fiction Carlyle has next to no interest, 
whether we take his work of 1823, when he was translating 
IVillu'hn Mcisicr, or of 1837, when unhappily he was criticising 
the novels of wScott. 

It matters not wliere we look into the writings of Carlyle, 
his fundamental attitude remains fixed. Our survey of the 
field oi romantic literature so far as it was explored by him — 
and he knew pretty clearly what was going forward in Ger- 
many, I'^rance and F.ngland — shows that he searched his field, 
as he searched all others, for some traces of transcendental 
truth, and that where he found none he regarded the territory 
as barren or nearly so. 'fhe earliest and most extreme mani- 
festations of romanticism, whether the oriental reveries of 
Werner and Novalis, the operatic sentimentalities of Rousseau, 
or the spectral and bloody business of the (lothic novels, Car- 
lyle never spoke of but to ridicule or condcnui ; and liyronism 
first and last rousetl him to something like invective. Hut 
when roiuanticism in its later stages developed in the direction 
of realism, and shook off some of the earlier extravagances, he 
expressed now and again a feeling of sympathy. For Carlyle 
was, as he himself says in Sterling;, a stubborn realist.^" We 
have seen that he foimd some merit in the great realists of the 

"^Sartor, 192-,^. Sec also Essays, 1, 184; II, 126; IV, 63, 163. Carlyle 
once proposed to Napier to write " a sort of sally on Fashional)lc Novels." 
Shepherd, 1, 80. "* Ibid., VI, 70. 

""Ibid.. IV, 50. ""Life of Sterling. i8o. 



89 

eighteenth century, and wc may contrast if we will his opinions 
of Schiller's early and later dramas.**'^ He believed that IJyron 
at the time of his death was emerging from Byronism, and he 
referred to the sincerity of Don Juan. Almost his only word 
of praise for Scott was that Scott made the past seem a reality 
and not merely a place for lay figures dressed in antiquated 
clothes. Let literature show some glimmer of truth, and Car- 
lyle finds in it something to praise ; let it dally never so little 
with what he regards as sham or falsehood and he is swift to 
pronounce his sentence of blame. 

"Life of Schiller, c. g., 19 and 153. 



CHAPTER V 

Carlyle's Place in the Introduction of German Litera- 
ture Into England 

Before considering certain of Carlyle' essays as illustrations 
of the application of his ideals to individual writers, it will be 
necessary to take some preliminary notice of his position as an 
introducer of German literature into England. If we even 
faintly appreciate the ignorance, not to say the stupid prejudice, 
of the English mind toward German literature for the first 
quarter of the century, and if we remind ourselves of the great 
and almost unaided efforts of Carlyle for nearly fifteen years 
thereafter to break down prejudice and leave no excuse for 
ignorance, we shall understand how incomplete the present 
study would be without some consideration of his place among 
the English pioneers who made the names of Schiller and 
Goethe known to their countrymen. Beyond a doubt Carlyle 
was the first really great interpreter of German thought to the 
English people. Out of thirty-four separate titles in the 
critical essays dow^n to 1839 (that is, to Chartism), half are 
upon German subjects : and to these must be added not only 
several articles now figuring as appendices, but also the Life 
of Schiller, the translation of Wilhelm Meister and of speci- 
mens of German Romance. Much of this work was done in 
spite of criticism so sneering as to dismay a purpose weaker 
than Carlyle's. Pie was called a German mystic, and was 
laughed at for worshipping strange divinities from over the 
seas. And yet he went on writing German reviews, partly of 
course because he made a living in that way, but partly because 
he was determined to prove to his readers that a new literature 
had grown up, so great, so life-giving, that they could not 
afford to remain in ignorance of it. Plow much the England 
of his and a later day owes to his literary labors in this field 

90 



91 

will become clearer if we glance at the situation as it was be- 
fore Carlyle's influence began to tell. 

Up to the time of William Taylor of Norwich, German lit- 
erature was little better than unknown in Great Britain. A 
few translations had appeared, most of them from lesser writ- 
ers and many in mutilated versions from the French, but these 
failed to awaken a deep or permanent interest. Brandl speaks 
1 : { Gcssner's Idyls as the " first offspring of the German muse 
which, under the Royal House of Hanover, found a welcome 
in England."^ At the same time (1762) there appeared the 
Death of Abel by the same author, followed a year later by a 
translation of Klopstock's Messiah and Death of Adam. Bod- 
ner's Noachide belongs to 1767, and there were versions of 
Wieland in 1771 and 1773. The latter year saw also a transla- 
tion of Lessing's Fables, which was succeeded in 1781 by a 
prose version of Nathan and in 1786 by a production of his 
Minna von Barnhehn on the London stage as the Disbanded 
Officer. Lessing won no popularity however before 1800. In 
1779 came the first English translation of Wcrter from the 
French. This novel was twice translated during the next ten 
years, and between 1784 and 1792 no fewer than nine con- 
tinuations and paraphases were published.- More than ten 
years elapsed before Schiller became much known, and by this 
time the influence of William Taylor and others was beginning 
to be felt.^ 

^ Life of Coleridge, 123. 

' Herzf eld, William Taylor von Norwich, 11. 

^ Taylor refers to an English translation of the Robbers, " executed, it 
is believed, by H. Mackenzie, Esq., of Edinburgh " ; and he quotes from 
"the original edition of 1781 " (^Historic Survey, III, 174). I can find 
no mention of such a translation by Mackenzie, who certainly did not 
know German in 1781, and probably not even in 1788 (see Diet. Nat. 
Biog., Vol. XXXV, 151). Lockhart speaks of the services to German of 
Alexander Eraser Tytler, " His version of Schiller's Robbers," says 
Lockhart, " was one of the earliest from the German theatre " (Life of 
Scott, I, 234, ed. Boston, 1861). It is possible that Taylor has mistaken 
Mackenzie for Tytler, though I have not been able to verify Lockhart's 
statement. 

In 179s came Schiller's Cabal and Love, in 1798 his Don Carlos, and in 
1800 his Wallenstein (by Coleridge). 



92 

Taylor deserves the distinction of being the first man in 
England to awaken any interest in modern German literature. 
His critical ability was slightly above mediocre but he exerted 
an important influence upon some of his contemporaries, whose 
united efforts contributed not a little to open the way for Car- 
lyle. Taylor spent the summer of 1782 in Germany, visited 
Weimar (though it is uncertain whether he saw Goethe), 
gained a sound knowledge of the language of Germany and 
came back with a love for its literature that continued through 
life. It was his unpublished translation of Burger's Lenore 
which stirred Scott's interest in German ballads of the diablerie 
kind ; and which, when published in 1796, played so interest- 
ing a part in early romanticism. In 1791, Taylor's versified 
version of Lessing's Nathan appeared, and two years later his 
Iphigenie, the first translation of Goethe's classical drama into 
English — which as late as 1828 Crabb Robinson regarded as 
the best English version of Goethe's longer poems.* For more 
than five and twenty years Taylor was a contributor to the 
Monthly Magazine and Monthly Reviezv, writing some hundred 
and thirty articles of all sorts. Many of these were transla- 
tions from the German and were subsequently collected in the 
Historic Survey. For a considerable period after 181 1, Tay- 
lor's interest in German literature lulled somewhat, though he 
was now recognized even by the Edinburgh Reviezv as the 
" head of all our translators " from the German.® In 1830 
he published his Historic Survey of German Poetry in three 
volumes, a work which his friends had long urged him to 
produce and which remains a record of his contribution to the 
spread of German literature in England. The Survey has a 
unique interest, for it is the most important representative of 
English opinions on German literature prior to Carlyle. Tay- 
lor's literary judgments rarely rise out of the commonplace and 
they are sometimes absurdly erroneous, as in the case of Kotze- 
bue, whose popularity in Europe, however, about 1800, was so 
dazzling as to blind nearly every critic to his faults. To Kotze- 
bue Taylor devotes almost as many pages as to Goethe, and he 
gives more to Wieland than to both together. In order to taste 

"■ Diary, II, 53. ^ Ed. Reviezv, VIII, 154. 



93 

his quality and to understand what PhiHstine opinion it was 
that Carlyle tried to break down, we may call attention to one 
or two of Taylor's comments concerning the work of Goethe. 
Of Faust he says: 

" Though not the best work of Goethe, it is the most singular, fantastic 
and impressive. The pious complain of its profaneness, the modest of 
its obscenity, the virtuous of its moral indifference, and the studious of 
its contemptuous satires on learning and acquirement : yet all allow that it 
has attraction and significance; that it displays a deep insight into the 
causes and motives of human conduct; and that, in the midst of its 
farcical marvels, it preserves a naturalness of delineation, which gives 
even to the impossible a certain impression of reality. Everyone forbids 
it to be read, yet each in his turn reads it."" 

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship he calls a " tedious planless 
novel," and Meister's ''Peregrinations," he says, shows a 
" senile garrulity,"^ phrases which seem also to reflect the judg- 
ment of a day much later than Taylor's. 

Among those whom Taylor's zeal inspired to study the 

^Survey, III, 323. 

'' Ihid., 348, 362. Taylor was probably administering an antidote to what 
seemed to him the infatuated eulogy of Carlyle, who is alluded to farther 
on : " The more recent works of Goethe have been surveyed with copious 
elegance, and exuberance of detail, by a contributor to the early numbers 
of the Foreign Revietv. To me they do not appear to merit so unqualified 
a panegyric, such lofty praise, as is there given " {Ibid., 378). 

The influence of Monk Lewis and Scott deserves mention. The services 
of Lewis are limited to his tales of wonder and terror and to a few 
plays and romances adopted or translated from the German. He visited ■ 
Weimer in 1792 and was introduced to Goethe. For a time he was a most 
important stimulator of the great vogue of German ghost, robber, and 
knight-romances and tales, but his place in the promotion of the higher 
class of German literature does not appear to be significant. He must 
have exercised some influence, however, in a personal way, as for example 
in his reading Faust to Byron. Scott's relations to Germany are well- 
known and of more account perhaps than those of Lewis. But even 
Scott can scarcely take rank among the enthusiastic students of German. 
His translation of Goethe's Gotz is referred to by Taylor "as admirably 
translated into English in i799 at Edinburgh by William Scott advocate," 
etc. {Survey, HI, 243). Aside from his ballad translations and that of 
Gots, his relation to German literature is to be found mainly in some few 
traces in his novels,— T/te Monastery, Kenikvorth, Ivanhoe, Peveril of the 
Peak for examples— and not in any work of a critical character, except 
an article on Hoffmann in the Quarterly Reviezv for July, 1827 (see Ball, 
Scott as a Critic of Literature, 104-5). 



94 

higher German Hterature was Henry Crabb Robinson, a 
name to be remembered for its place among the early ad- 
mirers of Schiller and Goethe. In 1798 Robinson records that 
"the most eventful occurrence of the year was an introduction 
to William Taylor of Norwich, who encouraged me in a grow- 
ing taste for German literature."^ Two years later he made 
his first trip to Germany, where he remained five years, study- 
ing at Jena and enjoying there and elsewhere contact with 
cultivated Germans. He was much at Weimer during its 
most flourishing peroid and saw Goethe, Schiller, Wieland and 
Kotzebue. He heard Wallenstein's Death at the Weimer 
theatre and apparently was favored with many opportunities 
to view the intellectual circle at close range. While at Weimer 
during this first visit, Robinson became a contributor to the 
Monthly Register. " The subjects on which I wrote," he says, 
"were German literature, the philosophy of Kant, etc. I also 
gave many translations from Goethe, Schiller and others, in 
order to exemplify the German theory of versification." But 
for the most part " I unaffectedly declare that they attracted no 
notice, and did not deserve any."" It was not indeed what he 
wrote but what he talked that made Robinson's influence im- 
portant in the introduction of German thought to England. 
No other Englishman of his time could boast of so much 
acquaintance with the higher literary circles of Germany. He 
made in all six visits, upon the third of which in 1829 he 
spent five evenings with Goethe.^" He met Tieck and later 
A. W. Schlegcl, when they were in London. He was there- 
fore solidly equipped to talk on German subjects, and he did 
so most assiduously for many years, if we may judge from the 
conversations on Schiller, Goethe and others recorded in his 
Diary. English opinion, as he seems to have encountered it, 
was almost uniformly hostile, and it was not until well into the 
thirties, that is to say when Carlyle's essays were beginning to 
be read, that Robinson began to find the old prejudice giving 
way. His recorded talks with Coleridge, for example, show 
Coleridge's rather habitual attitude of opposition, especially to 

* Diary, I, 24, " Ibid., 72. 

'" Goethe had previously sent Robinson two medals in testimony of his 
devotion to German literature. 



95 

Goethe. The general tenor is suggested in a single instance: 
Coleridge conceded to Goethe, says Robinson, " universal 
talent, but felt a moral life to be the defect of his poetry."" 

Coleridge might have done for German literature what 
Carlyle did later. He possessed the genius and the equipment. 
In 1797 he had begun to learn German and a year later he 
made his trip to Germany with the Wordsworths. There he 
plunged into Lessing's works, first for theological purposes, 
and read him through, and very soon proposed to translate him 
into English.^^ But most of Coleridge's plans ended in talk, 
except his splendid translations of Schiller's Piccolomini and 
Wallensteins Death, which, though neglected by the many, 
showed to the few what he was capable of doing for German 
literature in England. His activities in literature soon gave 
way to a wide wandering in the fields of German philosophy, 
and for the last twenty-five years of his life he was not an 
influence favorable to Schiller and Goethe. At no time in fact 
was he an influence at all commensurate with his genius and 
knowledge. Besides Coleridge there was another man who 
possessed genius and had considerable knowledge of German, 
De Quincey. Two papers by him on Lessing's Laocoon, and 
another on Kant appeared in Blackwood's in 1826 and 1827. 
But he first announced himself as a student and critic of 
German writers in the pages of the London Magazine, in 
which in 1821 he published an essay on Richter and some 
" analects." In 1823 he brought out a short paper on Herder, 
and more " analects " from Richter. De Quincey has undis- 
puted claim to the title of introducer of Richter to the English 
public, his first paper antedating Carlyle's by six years. But 
whoever wishes to test at first hand the superiority of Carlyle 
over De Quincey as an interpreter of Jean Paul should compare 
the solid, orderly opinions of the one with the jumbled, capri- 
cious opinions of the other. De Quincey and Coleridge were 
the two men, it should seem, who ought to have done more 
than any others before Carlyle to win a secure place for Ger- 
man literature in England. But Coleridge's plans and promises 
evaporated in talk, and De Quincey's brilliant detached efforts 
were not backed by the requisite firmness of mind. It is 
^^ Ibid., 160. ^- Brandl, 239-249. 



96 

doubtful, therefore, if the actual contemporary influence of 
these writers among cultivated people was anything like so 
great as that of Taylor and Robinson. ^^ 

Nothing so well shows how difficult it was to make a gap in 
the "Chinese Wall of antiquated prejudices" which divided 
England from Germany as the attitude of the great periodicals. 
For the first thirty years of the century the review that held 
most aloof from German thought was the Edinburgh. If not 
actually hostile, it maintained a position of condescension, sup- 
ported by inexhaustible ignorance. In its pages appeared re- 
views of Madame de Stael's Germany, Schlegel's Lectures, 
Lord Gower's translation of Faust, Goethe's Dichtting und 
Wahrheit and Carlyle's translation of IVilhclm Meister. From 
its high place it looked down and sneered at the so-called exagger- 
ation, clumsiness, and barbarity of German writers, and it never 
failed to be shocked at that " monster in literature," Goethe's 
Faust}*^ The ignorance, the " blessed self complacence " and 
the "do haut en has" position of the Edinburgh was vigor- 
iously opposed by Blackwood's.^^ Lockhart's early connection 
with the review is the source of much of its friendliness to the 
Germans and to Goethe in particular. In 1817, the year of 
Blackzvood's inception, Lockhart made a tour to Germany, met 
Goethe, and returned with something like reverence for the 
best German literature.^^ In the early numbers of the maga- 
zine there are many traces of Lockhart's hand in translations 
from Schiller, Burger, Korner, Haller and Goethe, as well as 
in various critical remarks which not only show the young 
reviewer's liking for Faust, but also his fondness for picking a 
quarrel with the Edinburgh}'' Blackwood's did indeed do 
more by translations than by critical reviews to dispel English 

" Robinson's enthusiasm for the Germans was as coldly received by 
Lamb, Southey and Wordsworth as it was by Coleridge, Cf. Diary, II, 
137; 79; Knight, Life of Wordsivorth, II, 324; Wordsworth's Prose Works, 
Gosart ed., Ill, 436. Shelley had doubtless little to do with the spread of 
German literature in England, but he was himself a reader of German 
works and was deeply moved by Faust. He read Schlegel's Lectures in 
1818 (Dowden, Life, I, 472; II, 187). 

"£. Review, Vol. LII. 252. "" Blackzcood's, III, 213. 

"Lang, Life of Lockhart, I, 11S-119. 

" Blackicood's, e. g., IV, 211 ; VII, 235. 



97 

ignorance of German writers. These translations appeared in 
a series called Horcu Gcrmaniccc which up to 1830 ran to 25 
numbers. But even these papers could not have done much to 
foster sound intelligent notions of the great works of Ger- 
many, for they were mostly concerned with the romantic 
dramas of Milliner, Grillparzer, Korner and the romances of 
Baron and Baroness Fouque. Tiic Quarterly Rcviczv must 
have done even less, as should be inferred from its Tory 
sympathies. It takes a somewhat middle ground between the 
EdinbiirgJi and Blacktcood's, neither opposing nor favoring, 
but condescendingly tolerating German literature in perfunc- 
tory criticism. From 1809, a year after its establishment, to 
1831. it published but three articles on German subjects worth 
mentioning, a review of Madame de Stael's Germany, of 
Schlegel's Lectures and of Lord Gower's translation of Faust 
and fragments of Faust by Shelley. It witnesses to the wide- 
spread ignorance of German literature, and it does not hesitate 
to say that Faust " may be read without danger though not 
without a painful feeling."^* 

Turn in what direction we will for light upon German litera- 
ture in England during the first quarter of the century, we 
find that the intellectual horizon is heavily clouded with ignor- 
ance and prejudice, only an ineffectual ray breaking through 
here and there. In the highest circles knowledge on this sub- 
ject was in most cases little better than superficial; worse still, 
such knowledge was so steeped in condescension and cant as to 
be of little help in diffusing any genuine admiration for the 
greatest writers, Lessing, Richter, Schiller and Goethe. A 
gap in the dead wall of English insularity was made by a 
foreign book, Madame de Stael's Germany, of which Carlyle 
said that it "must be regarded as the precursor, if not parent, 
of whatever acquaintance with German literature exists among 
us."^^ But the greatest force of all was undoubtedly Carlyle 
himself, whose essays on German subjects, for this service 
alone, ought to entitle him to a secure position in English 

^' Quarterly, Vol. X, 390. For a brief analysis of the positions of the 
earlier periodicals — the Monthly Review and the Anti-Jacobin — see Perry, 
German Influence in English Literature, Atlantic Monthly for August, 1877. 



98 

literary criticism of the nineteenth century. He it was who 
possessed the insight, knowledge and necessary courage to 
fight against a many-voiced and persistent opposition. From 
the first he understood the attitude in England toward German 
literature, as the introductory paragraphs in his preface to 
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship clearly show.^" He offers his 
German Romance as a small taper in total darkness.^^ He 
complains in 1827 that German literature is not only generally 
unknown, but misknown, since false and tawdry instead of 
genuine wares have been imported. ^^ But by 1830 we note a 
change, for, though Carlyle then and thereafter complained of 
English ignorance, he now began to discover a certain recogni- 
tion of Germany. Richter has " his readers and admirers,"^^ 
and knowledge of Schiller's works is " silently and rapidly 
proceeding."-* In 1832 he claims for Goethe some shadow 
of recognition, notably among the " younger, more hopeful 
minds."-^ And as late as 1838 he hopes that Germany is no 
longer a land of gray vapor and chimeras, " as it was to most 
Englishmen, not many years ago."-^ His hopes were indeed 
beginning to be realized, for both England and America 
through the influence of his efforts, were becoming interested 
in Germany. His position as a prophet, if not as a critic, of 
Goethe is preeminent. For years England looked to Carlyle 
as its greatest interpreter of the German poet, and men so 
different as Matthew Arnold and George Henry Lewes 
acknowledged their obligation. And if in recent times methods 
of criticism as to Goethe have changed greatly (since it has 
been the fashion to approach his work on different sides rather 
than as a whole) no critic can fail to recognize the substantial 
and pioneer service which Carlyle rendered to make his 
favorite poet known to his countrymen.-^ 

^^ Essays, II, 265. '^ Ibid., Ill, 3. 

'^Ibid., 1, 223. "^Ibid,, 71. 

''Ibid., 231. ''Ubid., IV, 14s. 

"^Ibid., 26; cf. 131, 176. "^Ibid., VI, 81; cf. Ill, 219; I, 286. 

'■'' John Sterling in an essay on Carlyle for the London and Westminster 
Review (1839), says: "It is not too much to say, that to these and 
other labors of the same hand (f. e., Carlyle's Essays and miscellaneous 
papers), is due almost all the just appreciation of Goethe now existing 
in England (Sterling, Essays and Tales, I, 294). 



CHAPTER VI 

The Essays on Goethe 

To show how Carlyle appHed his criticism to Goethe, we 
shall briefly analyze the two essays of 1828 and 1832.^ The 
extended introduction to the first essay and the great critical 
manifesto at the end of it, to which we have so often referred, 
evidence his sense of the immense difficulty of making Goethe 
understood to English readers of 1828. They declare too his 
purpose to remove, if he can, the distorted portrait drawn by 
the reviewers and to substitute another painted after his own 
ideals and in harmony with principles that are constructive. 
Here is "the highest reputation over all Europe," he says, 
"here is a poet whose spiritual progress symbolizes not only 
individual but national development." The business of the 
critic is to see this imposing figure as it is, to account for its 
exalted position, to "trace its history, to discover by what 
steps such influence has been attained." For this reputation, 
the essayist declares, is deserved and its influence is beneficial, 
because in Goethe we discover an artist in the old sense, a 
seer in whom wisdom, speaking from a harmonious manhood, 
delivers its message with a voice of authority. 

Carlyle handles his subject in his customary manner, con- 
sidering first the literary character and second the mind of this 
character as disclosed in its works. The present essay how- 
ever shows a modification of method as regards the biograph- 
ical section. Carlyle clearly understood that Goethe's personal 
life, at all events the most important part of it, namely, the 
moral and spiritual struggles, was interwoven in the written 
works ;2 and being interested above all else in Goethe's spiritual 

^The separate criticisms and notices of Goethe are: Preface to William 
Meister's Apprenticeship (1824), introduction to Meister's Travels in Ger- 
man Romance (1827), Goethe's Helena, Goethe (1828), Goethe's Portrait, 
Death of Goethe, introduction to a translation of Das Mdrchen, Goethe's 
Works (1832). "Essays, I, 177. 

99 



100 

development, he omits entirely the outer biographical facts and 
confines his treatment to the moral history of the poet as it is 
set forth in three or four prose pieces.-' h^irst is the period of 
Gots z'oit Bcrlichingcn and Werter. When these ajipcared, 
the mind of Europe, Carlyle says, was cold and conventional in 
literature, sensational and materialistic in philosophy, skeptical 
in religion. After Voltaire had set his torch to the jungle of 
superstition, nothing remained but doubt and unrest. This 
fever of discontent found an expression in these early works 
of Goethe. They remain as the record of a mind not yet 
freed from the slavery of self. In IVilhclm Meistcr's Appren- 
ticeship) Carlyle finds the second period of Goethe's growth. 
Here the outer and inner worlds have been reconciled, ideals 
now have their firm basis in actualities, the goal of human 
endeavor lies straight ahead. From this book the critic turns 
to its sequal, Meistcr's Travels, a work which he praises, nay 
almost worships, for the message it carries, and from which he 
extracts the greater number of passages quoted in the essay.* 
These two ])arts of W'ilhclm Meister together show Goethe's 
" change from inward imprisonment, doubt and discontent, into 
freedom, belief and clear activity,"^' and therefore prove him to 
be the representative modern man. 

The critical section is hardly one fifth as long as what pre- 
cedes, and the analysis is necessarily condensed and highly 
generalized. Ihit even here the method is typical, since Carlyle 
in his greater essays seldom regards individual pieces, but 
rather the author's mind as refiected in his work as a whole. 
Two general characteristics of Goethe are pointed out, his 
emblematic intellect" and his universality. As to special (|uali- 
ties Carlyle adds nc^thing to those described in his introduction 
to the I'rai'cls, from which he ([notes a passage on Cioethe's 

'The magnitude of his sulijcct, the limits of his space, and the fact 
llirit ho had a year before furnished a short biography were also factors 
in llie problem iif strueture. 

* The tenth and eleventh chapters in the Travels arc praised and are 
quoted from, on account of their thoughts on religion. 

»/{)/</., I, 2 10. 

"/. c, "his never-failing tendency to transform into slitipc, into life, the 
opinion, the feeling that may dwi'll in him " (IhiiL. jii). 



101 

calmness and beauty of spirit, as the fruit of long culture, and 
his philosophic mind wherein " the world is a whole." The 
interpretation concludes with a reference to Voltaire, who as a 
destroyer, is contrasted with the builder Goethe. 

Perhaps no other essay of Carlyle's so well illustrates his 
application of general principles to an individual case as does 
this first and greater appreciation of Goethe. It shows both 
the critic's strength and his limitations to unusual advantage, 
for it was written when his interest in criticism was at its 
height and it is concerned with the man to whom he acknowl- 
edged the heaviest spiritual obligations. He is careful to 
repeat several times that he does not attempt to judge the work 
of Goethe strictly and solely as literature, nor to apply the 
critical scales for measuring defects and blemishes considered 
by themselves, after the fashion of the older criticism.'^ Ac- 
cording to a fundamental principle in his criticism, which says 
you should interpret the spiritual essence of man and book — 
regarding each as counterpart of the other — as their true 
poetry, Carlyle seeks to expound the intellectual history of 
Goethe, his moral progress from unbelief to belief, his inter- 
pretation of the divine idea.® The method, so far, is character- 
istic, but the spiritual indebtedness of Carlyle to Goethe, noticed 
above, gives to this essay, as well as to the later one, some- 
thing special. Throughout there is the attitude of disciple to 
master.** The tone is reverential. Certain exaggerated judg- 
ments of Wilhelm Meister suggest the admiring and grateful 
pupil whom Goethe " had taught, whom he had helped to lead 
out of spiritual obstruction, into peace and light." Added to 
this spirit of reverence, and partly in consequence of it, there 
is, it must be admitted, a slight strain of didacticism here and 
there in the essay ; an element by no means implied in Carlyle's 
critical principles and not much evident in his earlier criticism.^" 
These deductions made, the reader will find little else to cause 
him to regard this essay as different from all the others in 
spirit and method. Carlyle consistently interprets Goethe from 
within, he does not censure from without. The idea, or the 

''Ibid., 176, 180, 181, 195, 198. 'Ibid., 213, 218. 

* Ibid., 182, 194, 202, 211. '"£. g., I, 195. 



102 

4, message of Goethe, lies in the fact that he is a builder and has 
lived a whole life in a time of halfness. This appreciation is 
firmly supported by the biographical, historical and compara- 
tive methods of criticism; for the life and environment of 
Goethe are never lost sight of, and his relation to his age, 
together with a comparison of his influence and Voltaire's, 
receives the notice due to a force like Goethe's. 

The second essay is significant, not because it adds to or 
subtracts from previous estimates, but rather because it shows 
the change that has taken place in Carlyle himself between 
1828 and 1832. In this period Sartor and Characteristics were 
written ; Carlyle, weary of reviewing, tired of the Germans, 
wished to deliver a personal message in an independent work. 
This last essay on Goethe witnesses to this condition of mind. 
One fifth of it is given up to a rhapsody on great men in the 
Teufelsdrockh manner. Four pages more are occupied with 
praise of Goethe and Napoleon as the two heroes of their era. 
Above the noise of hero-worship are heard echoes of the Re- 
form Bill of 1832 and of Benthamite utilitarianism. The 
prophet has invaded the domain of the critic. Critical in- 
terest has waned, for even in the body of the essay Carlyle 
declares that the greatest work of every man is the life he 
has led," and that concerning Goethe's writings in general " it 
is needless to repeat what has elsewhere been written. "^^ He 
therefore sketches Goethe's external history at considerable 
length, filling in with copious extracts from Dichtung und 
Wahrheit. When he reaches the period of Gots and VVerter 
he regards " what we can specially call the Life " of Goethe as 
commencing — the inner life, that is to say, with which the essay 
of 1828 is so largely concerned. This life now lies before him 
in forty volumes, but his characteristic summaries show that 
' Goethe has taught him nothing new. The central idea re- 
mains what it was. " In Goethe's Works, chronologically 
arranged," he says, "we see this above all things: A mind 
working itself into clearer and clearer freedom; gaining a more 
and more perfect dominion of its world."^^ The poet after 

"/bid., IV, 147. ■ ^''Ibid., 172. 

^^ Ibid., 169, 172. 



103 



1 



passing through three stages of development — the period of 
Werter, of the Apprenticeship, of the Travels — stands forth 
" as the true prophet of his time," a poet whose powers are so 
transcendent as to prompt the critic to place him in a class with 
Shakespeare. 

The essay of 1832 is inferior to the one of 1828. Carlyle 
is not less but more reverent. But his reverence is that of a 
prophet, not that of a critic. The didactic element is now ob- 
truded on all sides, not merely suggested in a remark here and 
there. And yet the methods used and the conclusions reached 
do not essentially differ from those in the earlier essay. Here, 
as there, the message, the mind of Goethe, is the thing. This, 
moreover, is regarded in its representative character, its rela- 
tion to society. Goethe is looked upon " chiefly as a world- 
changer, and benignant spiritual revolutionist," and " his 
Spiritual History is, as it were, the ideal emblem of all true 
men's in these days."^* Though Carlyle distinctly declares 
that now is not the time for a " critical examination " of the 
" merits and characteristics " of the voluminous writings of 
Goethe,^^ it is difficult for the student of his criticism to believe 
that the time would ever have arrived when Carlyle would, or 
even could, examine the work of Goethe except as an expres- ^ 
sion of the poet's spiritual history. This inner life, this truth 
or idea, Carlyle had indeed already set forth in such a manner 
as to show to the world what was for him Goethe's eternal 
significance. 

^*Ihid., 181. ^Ubid., 172. 



CHAPTER VII 

Carlyle and Voltaire 

The study of Goethe and the conditions which helped to 
produce him inevitably led Carlyle back to Voltaire, that witty, 
versatile and audacious Frenchman whose influence in the 
eighteenth century was as wide as the intellectual horizon of 
Europe. In 1829, the date of Carlyle's essay, Voltaire and 
Voltairism in England were synonymous with immorality and 
irreligion. To the average cultivated Englishman Voltaire had 
long stood as a perfect exemplar of the sensuality and 
hypocrisy, the unbounded impiety of the age of Louis XV. 
As a Quarterly reviewer expressed it, he was at once the 
wonder and the scorn of mankind. This extremely hostile 
position toward him was far more pronounced during the last 
quarter of the eighteenth century than it had been at any 
earlier date. When Voltaire visited England in 1726 as the 
brilliant and persecuted young author of CEdipe and La 
Henriade, he was received with attention by many and with 
particular favor by not a few ; and English life and thought 
left upon his restlessly inquiring intelligence a permanent in- 
fluence for good. But the England of 1726 was the England 
of Pope and Swift, Gay and Congreve, Bolingbroke and 
the elder Walpole. Forty years later in the reign of George 
III, though there were Voltairians like Hume, Gibbon and 
Horace Walpole, the opinions of the King and of Johnson 
were representative. They thought that Voltaire was a 
monster, even though a clever one, as the King remarked to 
Fanny Burney. At the time of the French Revolution this 
prejudice deepened into intense antipathy, not of course to 
Voltaire alone but to all that was French. During the first 
twenty-five years of the nineteenth century there was a gradual 
reaction, and Voltaire was rather widely read by educated and 
literary people. But with the exception of some acute, though 

104 



105 

casual, opinions from Hazlitt, no Englishman up to the time of 
Carlyle's essay in the Foreign Review had ventured to make a 
thorough critical study of Voltaire. Carlyle's was the first 
serious attempt to estimate the great Frenchman not as a 
monster of iniquity but as a human being. And if his inter- 
pretation does not to-day satisfy the rigid demands of more 
accurate if narrower scholarship, or of wider tolerance, it 
should have undisputed title to the position of the first among 
the great studies of Voltaire that have brought about a changed 
attitude toward him in England. 

Upon superficial consideration it should seem that Voltaire 
was the last man in the world to interest Carlyle. In all im- 
portant respects each was the intellectual antithesis of the 
other. In some of his phases one might be regarded as a gay 
and supple-minded skeptic, Europe's irreverent jester, France's 
typical Frenchman ; the other in the main was a religious, 
superserious mystic, nurtured among the straitest sect of 
Scotch Calvinists. These differences do indeed tell in Carlyle's 
interpretation, but with all his prepossessions and prejudices, 
Carlyle was keenly curious concerning a world-influence like 
Voltaire's and in 1828, his critical faculties were at their best. 
Besides, Voltaire was not to him merely an individual, but 
" the paragon and epitome of a whole spiritual period," a man 
" whose doctrines have affected not only the belief of the think- 
ing world; but in a high degree also, the conduct of the active 
and political world ; entering as a distinct element into some 
of the most fearful civil convulsions which European history 
has on record."^ In other words, Voltairism was more to 
Carlyle than Voltaire; he was more interested in the opinions 
and influence that emanated from Voltaire and spread over 
Europe than he was regarding the personal fortunes, the liter- 
ary tastes of the author of Zaire and Candidc. 

The subject is approached over the same broad principles 
that were laid down in the appreciation of Goethe. Carlyle 
urges upon his readers the need for sympathy with Voltaire, he 
presses Voltaire's claim to be regarded as a man and to be 
judged in terms of universal principles of human nature. 

^Essays, II, 124, 125. 



103 

" This is a European subject, or there never was one," he says; 
" and must, if we would in the least comprehend it, be looked at 
neither from the parish belfry, nor any Peterloo platform; but, 
if possible, from some natural and infinitely higher point of 
vision."^ The application of these principles to the subject in 
hand presents a problem which Carlyle states as follows : " To 
ascertain what was the true significance of Voltaire's history, 
both as respects himself and the world; what was his specific 
character and value as a man ; what has been the character and 
value of his influence on society, of his appearance as an active 
agent in the culture of Europe : all this leads us into much 
deeper investigations; on the settlement of which, however, 
the whole business turns. "^ The answer to these broad ques- 
tions, the interpretation of Voltaire that is to say, involves the 
use of all the methods which are a part of Carlyle's criticism, 
but chiefly the biographical and historical ; for the critic sees 
his material not only in its individual, but in its large social 
relations. 

Voltaire is appreciated first as a man, then as a writer; or 
first in his moral, and second in his intellectual capacity.* But 
whether as man or as writer he is studied always in relation to 
his age and as a part of it. Moreover he is not regarded 
merely on this side or that, but as a whole ; and the intellectual 
characteristics are thought of as growing out of the moral. To 
Carlyle Voltaire was a living unity, as Goethe was. 

The essay is one of the most regular in structure and most 
wide and sweeping in its generalizations that Carlyle ever 
wrote. The reader who knows his Voltaire and has some ap- 
preciation of Voltaire's multitudinous activities during a long 
life cannot but respect the thoroughness with which Carlyle 
seems to have gone over those " six-and-thirty quartos," ex- 
tracting so much of their essence and depositing it within the 
pages of a single review article. The latter-day critic may 
repeatedly find himself in disagreement with the conclusion 
reached, but if he suspects that this difference is due to want 
of knowledge on the part of Carlyle he is likely to discover 

'''Ibid., II, 128. Ubid., i.-?i, 161. 

'Ibid., 129. 



107 

somewhere in the essay a phrase or a sentence to dissipate his 
doubts. The characteristics of Voltaire the man are presented 
in an orderly analysis. His merits — adroitness and rectitude — 
hardly balance his defects or limitations — want of earnestness 
and inborn shallowness — for this Corypheus of deism was by 
birth a mocker. The age in which he lived fostered the lighter 
sides of his nature. In an epoch of disruption and decay, 
when society was hopelessly split into fragments, Voltaire 
became, not a philosopher and reconciler, but a partisan whose 
ruling passion was ambition and whose perpetual appeal was 
to his contemporaries. Public opinion was his deity, not 
eternal truth. " We see in him," says Carlyle, " simply a Man 
of the World, such as Paris and the eighteenth century pro- 
duced and approved of : a polite, attractive, most cultivated, 
but essentially self-interested man ; not without highly amiable 
qualities ; indeed with a general disposition which we could 
have accepted in a mere Man of the World, but must find very 
defective, sometimes altogether out of place, in a Poet and 
Philosopher,"^ Voltaire therefore " is no great Man, but only 
a great Persifleur," a phrase which may be taken as Carlyle's 
final formula for Voltaire on the moral side. The critic adds 
that the great Frenchman played his part with life-long consist- 
ency of aim, and deserves the high praise of being in "unity 
with himself."® 

In the interpretation thus far Carlyle expressly declares that 
he is trying Voltaire by too high a standard^ but that he has no 
other. He cannot avoid measuring Voltaire as he measures 
Goethe and Scott and Johnson, in terms of his own philosophy 
of life. Voltaire is not heroic and he is therefore not truly 
great. To him the Divine Idea was invisible, his soul did not 
dilate with the thought of the " Mighty All, in its beauty, and 
infinite mysterious grandeur." Voltaire's life therefore is neg- 
ative in its results, a life in which the first question always was 
" not what is true, but what is false, not what is to be loved, 
but what is to be derided."^ This estimate carries with 
it two opinions which Carlyle is careful to state: first, that 

^Essays, II, 144. ''Ibid., 145. 

'Ibid., 153. ^ Ibid., 135; cf, 135-139- 



108 

ridicule is a small and somewhat contemptible weapon;" 
and second, that Voltaire was not himself a serious man. 
The transcendentalist cannot highly rate the persifleur or 
much value his instrument of power. With all his shrewd- 
ness, his incomparable cleverness, Voltaire is a destroyer who 
applies a torch to burn, he is not a constructive force like 
Goethe who wields a hammer to build. 

Though these judgments, delivered from the high levels of 
Kantian philosophy and clothed in phrases of power and pictur- 
esqueness, are Carlylean through and through, and though they 
set forth an undeniable truth, namely, that Voltaire was neither 
a seer nor a lover of seers, they also make clear how all but 
impossible it is for a critic, living in one sphere of thought, to 
pass just sentence upon a writer who lives in an entirely dif- 
ferent sphere. While Voltaire was not a Cervantes, nor a 
Moliere, ridicule, in his hands, became what it had become in 
theirs, one of the most potent forces known to man against ex- 
travagance and corruption; and in this sense a positive influ- 
ence for good. In an age of levity and mockery, in a country 
ruled by the Duke of Orleans and Louis XV, when the sole 
restraint upon conduct was decorum and when superstition and 
sacerdotal power were carried to fantastic and degrading ex- 
tremes, ridicule was perhaps the only agent that would work 
reform. At all events, it is difficult to believe that the French 
society of the old regime would have responded to the philoso- 
phy of Kant or to the poetry of Goethe as it responded to the 
arrowy wit of Voltaire. Ridicule, in such an age and so used, 
is an ally, not an enemy of truth. It is easy to show more- 
over that Voltaire was serious, sometimes fiercely serious, in 
his use of ridicule. Behind his laughing face and his flashing 
eyes, there lived an intellect more sober and purposeful than a 
man like Carlyle is ever likely to believe. While neither above, 
nor pretending to be above, his age in many matters, Voltaire 
waged a life-long warfare for the enthronement of common- 
sense and practical wisdom in every realm of human interest. 
In an age more priest-ridden than most, he was an implacable, 
if not sometimes an heroic, foe to superstition and bigotry in 

''Ibid., 134. 



109 

religion. He was serious in countless activities, as an intro- 
ducer and popularizer of Newtonian science, as a disciple of 
Locke, as a defender of the honored but obsolescent traditions 
of French tragedy, and as a champion of absolute monarchy 
freed from the rule of the Church. Condorcet says that Vol- 
taire was serious even in his poem, La Pucelle, for in this piece 
so full of disgusting details, he was able to assail hypocrisy and 
ecclesiasticism in high places. How much of this seriousness 
was due to selfish ambition, how much to a love of humanity, 
it is not easy to say. Most readers who have reviewed the facts 
will probably be ready to say of many of Voltaire's activities 
what Carlyle says of some, that, if love of reputation inspired 
them, then "love of such reputation is itself the effect of a 
social, humane disposition."^" 

From Voltaire the man viewed in respect to his conduct, Car- 
lyle derives Voltaire the writer, both as man of letters and as 
religious polemic, viewed in respect to his intellect. The critic 
finds before him a complete illustration of the biographical 
method. " H, through all this many-colored versatility, we try 
to decipher the essential, distinctive features of Voltaire's intel- 
lect, it seems to us that we find there a counterpart to our 
theory of his moral character; as, indeed, if that theory was 
accurate, we must do: for the thinking and the moral nature, 
distinguished by the necessities of speech, have no such dis- 
tinction in themselves ; but, rightly examined, exhibit in every 
case the strictest sympathy and correspondence, are, indeed, 
but different phases of the same indissoluble unity,— a living 
mind. In life, Voltaire was found to be without good claim 
to the title of philosopher ; and now, in literature, and for sim- 
ilar reasons, we find in him the same deficiencies."^^ The inter- 
pretation follows the familiar path and comes to the same end. 
Voltaire is not a poet because he lacks genius, the deep feeling 
and the clear vision, because a tragedy or a poem with him is 
not a manifestation of everlasting Reason. He has method, but 
not " poetic method " ; he has wit, but no humor ; he has order, 
but no beauty. Neither in prose, nor in verse, in tale, epic, pas- 
quinade, or history, does he excite the soul to a sense of spirit- 
^'> Essays, II, 132. "^ Essays, II, 162. 



110 

ual realities. Voltaire makes no appeal to man's highest 
faculty, his reason. Whatever claims he has to distinction must 
be defended upon other grounds, upon the ground of under- 
standing, the second term which Carlyle takes over from Kan- 
tian philosophy. In the realm of the understanding, Voltaire 
is preeminent ; his works have the superficial, practical, logi- 
cal, unimaginative character which gives to them the highest 
value in the world of business relations. They exhibit expert- 
ness, superficial extent, humanity ; their consummate order 
declare Voltaire to be the " most intelligible of writers." If 
he is not a genius, he is at least an unrivalled talent ; if there 
is in him no gleam of the divine idea, he is able to display his 
intelligence in a thousand protean forms.^^ 

In this interpretation of Voltaire as a writer Carlyle has 
given us eight or ten pages of brilliantly generalized criticism, 
perhaps unequalled elsewhere in his writings, unless it be in the 
essay on Burns. Nowhere else in the same space, certainly, 
has he thrown out more or better summaries and suggestions 
as to literary values. And to the Anglo Saxon mind at least, 
most of his criticism seems fundamentally sound. ^^ Voltaire's 
writings open no vista to realms of the spirit, drop no plummet 
into the abysses of the human heart. With some of the world's 
truest interpreters of the soul, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Pas- 
cal, he had little or no sympathy. Jesus, Peter and Paul were 
names which he could not dissociate from ecclesiastical wars 
and from superstition through all the centuries. Had Carlyle's 
master, Goethe, been Voltaire's contemporary, Voltaire would 
not have understood his message and would have ridiculed 
much of the form in which it was conveyed. Faust must have 
been to him no voice from the skies, but the unintelligible 
utterance of a rude foreigner. When thought left the daylight 
world of practical wisdom, when it strayed from the path of 
good sense and good taste, as these were understood in the 
France of the eighteenth century, Voltaire laughed at it as the 
vagary of a superstitious or an uncultivated mind. His con- 

^^ Ibid., 162-170. 

" Cf. Brunetiere, Etudes Critiques, I, 248-253 ; Fagnet, Dix-Huitieme 
Steele, 247. 



11] 

temporary Rousseau was to him only a celebrated ignoramus 
who used his intellect to prove men beasts. It is not strange 
that Carlyle could find no poetry in Voltaire ; there was none 
to seek, at least of the kind he looked for. Interpretative and 
philosophical criticism must therefore come to negative con- 
clusions. 

But Voltaire is perhaps the most conspicuous example of a 
class of writers who suffer from a too exclusive application of 
this method — men of letters who live by their pen and who 
exert a prodigious influence upon their immediate contempo- 
raries. Carlyle's criticism leaves Voltaire the man of letters 
too much in the background. The literary history of France 
in the eighteenth century without Voltaire, would be Hamlet 
with Hamlet left out. Upon every field of thought he left his 
impress. In history he was a progressive force ; in the drama 
a conservative one. He could write a story or a poem that 
would stir the salons of France to laughter. His letters, ex- 
pressed in phrases of matchless limpidity and grace, carried 
messages of power to all parts of Europe and brought down 
ridicule upon imposters and quacks, or won justice for those 
who had suffered from the want of it. Voltaire's pen was 
literally mightier than the sword of Louis the Well-Beloved. 
Of this Voltaire, Carlyle's interpretation gives but an indistinct 
picture and yet perhaps the one portrait that the world would 
care to preserve, fresh and clear, is that which presents Vol- 
taire as the incarnated Spirit of French letters in the Eight- 
eenth Century. 

It is as a religious polemic rather than as a man of letters 
that Voltaire figures most prominently before the world, in the 
opinion of Carlyle. In other words Voltairism, or warfare 
upon revealed religion, is greater than Voltaire. Here too we 
find intellectual unity. " We may say in general," says Car- 
lyle, "that his style of controversy is of a piece with himself; 
not a higher, and scarcely a lower style than might have been 
expected from him."^* Voltaire is ingenious and adroit, not 
noble and comprehensive. In his battle with unreason 
he fights with borrowed weapons ; he marches under the 

^* Essays, II, 171. 



112 

flag of English thinkers and the French Bayle. More than 
this, his knowledge is shallow, since it turns wholly upon 
the inspiration of the Scriptures and regards Christianity as a 
book-made religion ; whereas religious truth is revealed to man 
not through books, but by intuition, is born not to the under- 
standing, but to the reason. Voltaire's faults, says Carlyle, are 
also the chief faults of his time and country. " It was an age 
without nobleness, without high virtue or high manifestation of 
talent ; an age of shallow clearness, of polish, self-conceit, skep- 
ticism and all forms of Persiflage." It is little surprising, he 
adds, that Voltaire in such an age " should have partaken 
largely of all its qualities. "^^ His task in this epoch was not 
one of affirmation, but of denial. Voltairism then, according 
to Carlyle's formula, is negation.^® 

In this final appreciation it will be seen that Carlyle applies 
once more the same high standards of criticism: true religion, 
like true literature or true life, is not a creation of the under- 
standing, but of the reason. And once more it may be said that 
Carlyle's position, from the point of view of the unchanging 
realities of the inner life, is unassailable. Voltaire was not an 
original thinker, but a popularizer of other men's thinking. 
His work, interpreted from so exalted a position, is irreverent 
in spirit and negative in results. The man who for twenty 
years and more, in the Philosophical Dictionary and in hundreds 
of letters, relentlessly fought established religion, or the In- 
famous as he called it, is little likely to yield to later genera- 
tions much of the real spirit of Christianity, or of religious 
reverence, in Carlyle's meaning of the word. But again Car- 
lyle's criticism needs to be supplemented with a criticism that 
takes fuller account than does his, of the positive results of 
Voltaire's work as regarded from the point of view of Vol- 
taire's own age and country. For while the critic is swift to 
condemn the era of Louis XV and frankly recognizes its life 
as something to be torn down and swept away, he cannot heart- 
ily praise Voltaire and Voltairism for their large part in the 
labor of destruction. He does not make sufficiently clear what 
Christianity stood for in the old regime ; how for the most part 

^^ Ibid., 179. ^^ Ibid., 171-179. 



113 

it was identical with a corrupt and superstitious sacerdotalism, 
how it compromised and coexisted with all forms of vice, fet- 
tered the press, fought enlightenment and strove to hold the 
people of France down to an ever debasing ignorance. Nor 
is Carlyle just in declaring that the age of Voltaire was not one 
of creation and discovery, and that the French philosophers 
came to criticise and quarrel and rend to pieces, but not to 
invent and produce.^^ In natural, economic and political 
science the period was constructive in many directions and did 
much to build the foundations for the religious and political 
liberty of a later age. But it is not our purpose to supply the 
omissions in Carlyle's interpretation. We wish rather to point 
out here, as we have earlier in connection with other divisions 
of the essay, that the ideals of criticism by which he measures 
the polemical work of Voltaire, work so largely contemporary 
and therefore transient in character, are far too high, if applied 
exclusively ; since in the application of such standards the im- 
mense influence for good of Voltaire upon his own day and 
generation is not appreciated at its full worth. Had Carlyle 
praised for its positive result the death-stab which, as he so 
finely says, Voltaire gave to modern superstition, his interpre- 
tation of this third phase would scarcely need to be qualified.^* 

^^ Ibid., 178-179. 

" The essay on Voltaire, as has been pointed out, shows Carlyle's failure 
to " perceive that the positive achievements of Voltaire could not have been 
won in any age by a man not truly great in a positive sense." This, of 
course, is to measure Voltaire by other standards than Carlyle's. 



CHAPTER VIII 

The English Essays 

Carlyle wrote but three essays on English subjects, Burns, 
BoswcU's Life of Johnson and Sir Walter Scott. He proposed 
to write others, notably one on Byron and another on " Fash- 
ionable Novels," but they never appeared, chiefly because 
Napier, the successor to Jeffrey as editor of the Edinburgh 
Review, to whom they were offered, was warned that Carlyle 
was a man to be feared as an intense radical and a hysterical 
worshipper of German divinities. The three essays, which 
therefore constitute his deliberate appreciation of English au- 
thors, cover a decade of time and roughly mark the end of three 
critical periods in Carlyle's literary fortunes. The essay on 
Burns was the first work executed at Craigenputtock, whither 
in 1828 he had moved from Edinburgh in order to toil and 
think and be beyond the reach of interruptions. His critical 
interest was now at its height, and he had entered the field of 
letters far enough to be recognized as a new force. But as 
we have said so often, reviewing in no long time gave way to 
prophesying; Sartor succeeded Signs of the Times, and Char- 
acteristics followed Sartor. Carlyle became restless to deliver 
his personal message to the world. His letters during this per- 
iod show that he was considering great moral subjects, — Luther 
and the German reformation, John Knox and the Scottish 
reformation. Finally in 1831 he went up to London to try his 
fortunes with Sartor, but the publishers would not print it. 
Carlyle remained in the metropolis through the winter, a lonely 
crabbed mystic, sneering and sneered at, a man whose literary 
and material fortunes still hung in the balance. In the spring 
before returning to Craigenputtock, at the request of James 
Eraser, the publisher, he wrote a review of Bos well's Life of 
Johnson. This great essay, like the second one on Goethe 
written a few months later, may in one sense be regarded as the 

114 



115 

lyrical cry of a lonely prophet who felt that he must preach 
heroism to an unheroic, distracted age. After this essay was 
written there followed another period of struggle, uncertainty 
and ill-fortune. Carlyle became absorbed in a study of the 
French Revolution and in 1834 he moved to London where he 
could get books to carry on his work. Amidst the harrowing 
labor of these years the voice of the critic became silent. But 
in 1837 when the History was completed, this voice was heard 
once more, not indeed passionate and melodious, as it had been 
a decade ago, but still strong and commanding, fit to win at- 
tention even from those who denied its authority. The essay 
on Sir Walter Scott, published in 1838, was the last of the criti- 
cal essays, and with it the career of Carlyle the critic may be 
said to have come to a close. 

(a) Burns 

Of all the essays from Carlyle's pen that on Burns is the 
best known and most admired. As Dr. Garnett so well said, 
it is the " very voice of Scotland." In Burns Carlyle found 
a subject that fired his heart, a native poet whose songs and 
whose tragical life alike stirred him to passionate sympathy. 
To his eyes the Ayrshire poet appeared not as a vulgar wonder 
to be stared at from the heights of literary Edinburgh, but as 
Scotland's most original genius and as one of the song-makers 
of the world. The affinities between Burns and Carlyle were 
numerous and special. Both were sons of Scottish peasants, 
both w^ere poor, proud, independent, gifted and ambitious. 
Like Carlyle, Burns was born to wage war with a hostile en- 
vironment, unlike him he was destined to be defeated because 
his will was not as Carlyle's, the will of a Titan. His tragical 
fate, together with his origin and environment, moved the critic 
to love and pity. Instead of the turbid stream of declamation 
that was sometimes poured into the later essays, there flows 
through this interpretation of Burns a tenderness almost fem- 
inine and a spirit of devotion almost sentimental. Even down 
to his closing years Carlyle would recite or hum over to him- 
self the verses of Burns with the deep delight born of real 
community of spirit. 



116 

He makes no apology for giving up two-thirds of his essay 
to the life of Burns. " It is not chiefly as a poet," says Car- 
lyle, " but as a man, that he interests us and affects us."^ 
Here was a tragical career peculiarly alluring to the moralist, 
here was a gifted genius gone to ruin because he failed to rec- 
oncile the ideal with the actual, failed, that is, to put into prac- 
tice the great Goethean doctrine of renunciation. Into his 
account of Burns's waverings between inner and outer condi- 
tions Carlyle has put the sum-total of his own ethical philosophy. 
He measures the " inward springs and relations " of Burns's 
character in terms of the high ideals he applies to all other 
men. Burns, he says, was born a true poet and therefore 
should have been a prophet and teacher to his age.^ He should 
have fitted himself by rigorous discipline, by self-denying toil, 
to deliver his message to his generation. But a man born to be 
a vates or seer must live a whole life, he cannot be anything by 
halves. The grand error in Burns's life was " the want of 
unity in his purposes, of consistency in his aims." It was 
" a hapless attempt to mingle in friendly union the common 
spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, which is of a far 
different and altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns was 
nothing wholly."^ 

In discussing the want of harmony between the clay soil of 
Mossgiel and the soul of Burns, Carlyle takes large account of 
circumstances, the poet's material condition and the influences 
of the period. He recognizes the pressure of the external 
fact in the form of poverty, lack of education, early tempta- 
tions to depart from the right path. He thinks too that Burns's 
religious quarrels were a " circumstance of fatal import."* 
But of all the outer forces that helped to wreck the poet's life, 
Carlyle regards the visits to Edinburgh as strongest. These 
did him great and lasting injury and maddened his heart " still 
more with the fever of worldly ambition." Had the patrons 
of genius left Burns to himself " the wounds of the heart would 
have been healed, vulgar ambition would have died away." 
"These men, as we believe, were proximately the means of 

^Essays, II, 6; cf. 29. ^ Ibid., 47. 

''Ibid., 46. *Ibid., 33. 



117 

his rtiin."^ But it would have been contrary to Carlyle's phi- 
losophy of Hfe to place the final blame elsewhere than upon 
Burns himself. " Plis was no bankruptcy of the purse," says 
the moralist, " but of the soul."*' It lay in the power of the 
poet to have lived true to his higher self, to have listened to 
the voice of the poetic spirit within him, to have made all else 
save himself and his art a small matter.' For the reason that 
Burns did not live upon this high level, did not bend his soul 
to the work of revealing the divine idea, Carlyle pronounces his 
life a fragment. 

The general truth of this concluding judgment may pass un- 
challenged. Burns's life was partial and incomplete. It is idle 
too to question Carlyle's opinion that the cause of failure lay 
ultimately with the poet himself. Those whose philosophy of life 
differs from that of Carlyle may place the blame upon a cruel 
environment, but, as our entire study has shown, his opinion 
follows necessarily from the ideals which he held. We may, 
however, point out that he does not treat the great critical 
period in Burns's life, the visits to Edinburgh, with strict jus- 
tice. Cynicism and prejudice seem to have deflected his judg- 
ment. It was inevitable that Carlyle should seize upon this pic- 
turesque and dramatic episode and make much of it. It was 
equally inevitable, perhaps, with his hatred of " gigmanity," 
that he should add to his final opinion a special condemnation 
of the upper classes. We may admit at once that the poet's 
two visits to Edinburgh unsettled him for a time. He saw, 
as he had not seen before, the pitiless divisions between the 
upper and lower strata of society, and he learned for the first 
time that genius without habitual refinement is not a sure guar- 
antee of social equality. But the subsequent tenor of Burns's 
life shows very plainly that his Edinburgh visits did not madden 
him with the fever of worldly ambition. The higher classes 
moreover did help him to answer the question what next to do. 
More than all else we must not overlook, as Carlyle appears to 
have done, the fact that Burns's ostracism from society at Edin- 
burgh and later at Dumfries really came as the result of his 

'Ibid., 37-40. ''Ibid., 46, 49, 51. 

'Ibid., 39. 



118 

own evil courses. The convivial poet, alternating between the 
tables of the high and the taverns of the low, and fast descend- 
ing to the lowest, could not expect to retain the favor and 
social patronage of refined people. Such important phases of 
the ethical question at all events Carlyle does not seem to have 
treated quite candidly, or rather he is prone to give to the Edin- 
burgh visits an active part in the tragedy of Burns's life, when 
at most it was seductively passive. 

As with the life, so with the writings of Burns. His moral 
nature was at war with itself and therefore his work remains 
without the unity of a great idea — remains " a poor mutilated 
fraction of what was in him ; brief, broken glimpses of a 
genius that could never show itself complete."^ " We can 
look on but few of these pieces," says Carlyle, speaking of the 
poetry of Burns, " as, in strict critical language, deserving the 
name of Poems : they are rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, 
rhymed sense ; yet seldom essentially melodious, aerial, poet- 
ical."" Burns therefore is " not perhaps absolutely a great 
poet " ; he " never rose, except by natural effort and for short 
intervals into the region of great ideas. "^*' Since the poet 
attained no mastery in his art, the critic thinks it would be " at 
once unprofitable and unfair" to try him, his imperfect frag- 
ments, by the " strict rules of Art."" In these opinions, how- 
ever, the final judgment is implicit. Burns is not a great poet 
because he has no idea to reveal, because he speaks no word 
of authentic truth. But if not absolutely great, he is " a poet 
of Nature's own making,"^^ and " one of the most considerable 
British men of the eighteenth century."^^ His work has an en- 
during quality, a rare excellence that merits high appreciation. 
The source of its sustained vitality, Carlyle finds to be sincerity, 
graphic phrasal power, vigor and fineness of mind, as shown 
in the poet's love, indignation and humor. Nowhere else in 
the considerable mass of Burns criticism is there an interpre- 
tation so sympathetic, so illuminated with flashes of inspired 
comment as this which Carlyle has given us in a few short 

^Ibid.. 8. ^Ibid., 5, 8. 

"Ibid., 23. ^Ibid., 13. 

''Ibid., 13, 18. '^Ibid., 4. 



119 

pages. The treatment is critical in the best sense. Carlyle's 
insight, knowledge and sympathy are nowhere used to better 
results, and he evidences an appreciation of the phrasal beauty 
and emotional value of poetry all too rare in his critical essays. 
Perhaps the strongest proofs of his original capacity for 
criticism are the few paragraphs on Tarn O'Shanter, The Jolly 
Beggars and the songs of Burns. Here criticism shows itself 
to be truly a creative art, as Carlyle said it was. Tarn O'Shan- 
ter, he says, is " not so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling 
rhetoric." Its parts, its naturalism and supernaturalism, are 
not properly fused ; it is not strictly comic, but farcical ; it is 
not organically, but artificially, alive. Carlyle, we observe, is 
here applying his test of unity or central truth, with negative 
results ; and to him therefore Burns's Tain O'Shanter lacks uni- 
versal, symbolic significance ; is not poetry but rhymed farce.^* 
He measures The Jolly Beggars by the same standard. This 
poem rises " into the domain of Art," because it " seems thor- 
oughly compacted; melted together, refined," because its char- 
acters are at once " Scottish, yet ideal," because it expresses a 
" universal sympathy with man." It has, in other words, 
inner and outer correspondence, a universal appeal, and is a 
self-supporting whole, " the highest merit in a poem." In these 
few passages we have a theory of art of Aristotelian breadth 
applied to concrete material with suggestive results.^'' The 
songs are considered " by far the best that Britain has yet pro- 
duced." Carlyle ranks Burns as " the first of all of our Song- 
writers," and thinks that Burns's chief influence as an author 
will ultimately rest upon his songs. The second paragraph in 
this section is the very poetry of criticism, worthy to be classed 
with the appreciations of Charles Lamb at their best. Had 
Carlyle chosen to develop the vein that shows itself here, it 

" Considering the time of its deliverance, this criticism shows Carlyle's 
independence of judgment perhaps better than any other that we can 
point to. All the critics before him, Jeffrey, Scott, Lockhart, Hazlitt, 
Byron, Wordsworth, regarded Tam as Burns's masterpiece. So did Burns. 
(Wallace, Life, III, 254.) 

^^ The Jolly Beggars was not much noticed by the early critics. It was 
not indeed published in complete form till 1802. Scott praises it highly. 
Matthew Arnold with Carlyle ranks it higher than Tam O'Shanter. 



120 

should seem that he might have become one of England's two 
or three great critics.^" 

It is when we consider the treatment of the poet's relation 
to the literature of his own day that we must deduct some- 
thing from our praise of Carlyle as a critic, especially in his 
use of the historical method. He touches lightly, though 
masterfully, upon the literary revival in Scotland and upon 
Burns's share in it. " In this brilliant resuscitation of our 
' fervid genius,' " he says, " there was nothing Scottish, noth- 
ing indigenous." Culture was exclusively French and at- 
tenuated. But after Burns's day a spirit of nationalism sprang 
up, and literature became native, domestic, democratic. In 
this change Scott's influence is acknowledged, but the influ- 
ence of Burns also, says Carlyle, " may have been considerable," 
for *' his example, in the fearless adoption of domestic sub- 
jects, could not but operate from afar." Historical criticism 
in so far is sound. But Carlyle makes a mistake in regarding 
the work of Burns as the beginning of a new movement rather 
than as the culmination of an old. His casual and depreciating 
notices of Ramsay and Ferguson, the predecessors of Burns, 
and his apologetic reference to the Scottish dialect, together 
with various remarks on Burns's lack of proper education, 
indicate that he did not correctly appreciate the relation of the 
poet to the vernacular school of poetry. Had Burns written 
exclusively in English, following the models and literary in- 
fluences of that day, he would now belong to the school of 
Shenstone, Thomson and Pope; for his English poetry is 
admitted on nearly all sides to be his weakest — stiflf, imitative, 
Augustan. The true way is to interpret the poetry of Burns 
as the flowering of a spirit transmitted through Ferguson and 

'* In relating this bit of criticism of the songs to Carlyle's general theories, 
we should not forget that to him a song belongs after all to the outlying 
province of poetry, is " a brief simple species of composition " (Ibid., 23- 
26). " Had Carlyle been able to take the modern point of view of the 
student of genres and if he had considered the power of the lyric in all ages 
to go, as scarcely any other form of art does, straight to the heart of man, 
and then had noted that Burns had gone to the heart of Scotland and 
indeed of the world, he might have had doubts with regard to his denial 
of Burns's greatness as a poet " (comment made upon my manuscript). 



121 

Ramsay from the older Scottish Makers. Burns was greatly 
indebted to this vernacular literature, for language, meters, 
subjects, even for ideas, phrases and entire verses. What now 
seems fulsome praise of Ramsay and Ferguson in the preface 
to the Kilmarnock Edition of his poems, was a sincere, if 
grandiloquent, tribute to the lesser poets who kindled his own 
purer flame. ^^ The truth is, Carlyle gives little hint of Burns 
the craftsman, a subject that would compel consideration of 
the poet's predecessors in vernacular song, of his ways of 
handling that older literature, and of his magical power of 
creating an immortal song from some rude, popular jingle. 
Burns was an uneven and often a slovenly craftsman, but at 
his best he was a deliberate and consummate artist, sifting his 
material with anxious care and fashioning it to suit his high 
technical demands. Carlyle's essay, therefore, while great as 
an interpretation of the life of the poet and of the substance 
of his poetry, must be supplemented by the work^® of later 
scholars and critics, if Burns is to receive his full measure of 
justice. 

(b) Boszvell and Johnson 

In the second English essay, Boszvell's Life of Johnson, 
Carlyle is both critic and prophet. The changed style and 
thought proclaim the prophet. Peculiarities of language which 
found full expression for the first time in Sartor appear in this 
essay in considerable profusion. Hero-worship, the prophet's 
special message, is thrust forward in two or three expressions 
and in connection with the main subject itself. Johnson and 
his biographer, Boswell, are indeed cogent illustrations of a 
doctrine increasing in favor with Carlyle ; for in them he found 
both hero and hero-worshipper, each by a kind of divine at- 
traction, drawn to the other for the edification of succeeding 
generations. From this point of view, moreover, it is difficult 
to avoid regarding the entire essay as a tract for the times. 
In 1832 reform agitation was at its height. The conditions of 

" Though Carlyle speaks in an apologizing tone of the Scotch dialect, 
all the songs and poems that he cites, except two, are from the Scotch. 
"£. g., the Centenary Edition of Burns by Henley and Henderson. 



122 

English life, political and social, were alarming to many minds. 
The tide of innovation was strong and men feared that the 
old landmarks were in danger of being swept away. Carlyle, 
then in London, watched the current of affairs with eager 
interest, in fact with apprehension ; for reform never meant to 
him, what it did to the utilitarians, a change in external condi- 
tions merely. Unless reform reached the individual and lifted 
him to a better life, Carlyle distrusted and condemned it, he 
even feared it. The only way the individual can be bettered, 
he said, is by contact with another greater individual ; soul is 
kindled only by soul. His remedy for the distracted times of 
1832, therefore, was the gospel of hero-worship. 

But the prophet does not quite usurp the place of the critic. 
No other essay displays deeper discernment or more thorough 
knowledge of subject than this, and it is only below the first 
Goethe and the Burns in sympathy. In epithet and phrase, 
from the first page to the last, there are flashes of keenest 
insight. Illuminating suggestions on literature and life are 
strewn lavishly along the way. We find Carlyle, moreover, 
measuring Boswell and Johnson, the men and their work, by 
precisely the same standards which he applied in earlier essays 
to Richter and to Goethe. The critical method remains un- 
changed, because the principles upon which it was established 
are in 1832 what they were in 1828. 

A telling proof of the sustained vitality of Carlyle's critical 
powers is his treatment of Boswell. To say aught in 1832 in 
defense of Johnson's biographer was to fly in the face of all 
literary opinion. From 1768 when Gray, commenting on Bos- 
well's first literary venture, the book on Corsica, said that " any 
fool may write a most valuable book if he will only tell what he 
heard and saw with veracity,"^^ down to 183 1 when Macaulay 
in the Edinburgh Reviezv launched his notorious paradox that 
Boswell would never have been a great writer if he had not 
been a great fool, Boswell had been the object of unmeasured 
ridicule. His only title to public recognition seems to have 
been his many-sided folly. Carlyle clearly saw the position 
which Boswell occupied before the British public, but he re- 

"Gray, Works, III, 310. 



123 

fused to believe that a great biography had been written by a 
fool, or that good work could be done by reason of weaknesses 
or vices. His entire theory of life and of literature was 
against such a false paradox. He did not shut his eyes to 
Boswell's follies and foibles, he saw them with a keener vision 
than did Macaulay, and his portrait of the exterior Bozzy 
ranks as a masterpiece in a gallery of great paintings. But to 
laugh at a man's fantastic freaks and to catalogue them is not 
the same as to interpret the man. Macaulay's Boswell was not 
for Carlyle the biographer of Johnson. In the place of a false 
paradox he supplied a true one. Here he said is a man who 
" has provided us a greater pleasure than any other individual 
. . . ; perhaps has done us a great service and can be espe- 
cially attributed to more than two or three ; . . . yet no written 
or spoken eulogy of James Boswell anywhere exists." This 
situation existed because critics had seen the visible vices of 
Boswell, but had no insight into his hidden virtues. Boswell 
is correctly understood, says Carlyle, only when we think of 
him as a disciple, a hero-worshipper. He had in him a " love 
of excellence " invisible to the general eye. In an unspiritual 
eighteenth century when " Reverence for Wisdom " had well- 
nigh vanished from the earth, Boswell was raised up to be " a 
real martyr to this high everlasting truth " that " Hero-worship 
lives perennially in the human bosom." True to his biograph- 
ical method, Carlyle finds in this interpretation a key to the 
greatness of Boswell's work. " Boswell wrote a good Book 
because he had a heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an 
utterance to render it forth ; because of his free insight, his 
lively talent, above all, of his Love and childlike Openminded- 
ness. None but a reverent man could have found his way 
from Boswell's environment to Johnson's." The critic men- 
tions insight and talent as a part of the biographer's equipment, 
but he lays stress upon certain unconscious powers, like rever-. 
ence and love, as the greater part. Carlyle indeed finds in 
Boswell a capital illustration of his theory of art as an uncon- 
scious process. " We do the man's intellectual endowment 
great wrong," he says, " if we measure it by its mere logical 
outcome ; though here too, there is not wanting a light in- 



124 

genuity, a figurativeness and fanciful sport, with glimpses of 
insight far deeper than the common. But Boswell's grand in- 
tellectual talent was, as such ever is, an unconscious one." He 
is, therefore, " one of Nature's own Artists," and his book is 
great because of its " import of Reality," because it is " wholly 
credible." Upon these terms Carlyle's praise of the Life be- 
comes poetical, one of the sunny spots of interpretation that 
proves the illuminating presence of the critic. His final judg- 
ment is expressed in a sentence : " In worth as a Book we 
have rated it beyond any other product of the eighteenth cen- 
tury : all Johnson's Writings stand on a quite inferior level 
to it."-° 

This interpretation of Boswell is one of the highest services 
that the criticism of Carlyle has done for English literature. 
Because of it, England's greatest biographer has been lifted 
from a place of ridicule and contempt to one in which his 
real greatness is recognized. Since 1832, critical opinion has 
not only regarded the Life of Johnson as the first of biogra- 
phies, but it has more and more come to understand that 
Boswell himself is one of England's truest literary artists who 
knew perfectly well the richness of his material and who knew 
how to shape it in obedience to the aim of a supremely self- 
conscious purpose. But if Carlyle's portrait, brilliant as it is, 
had remained untouched by later criticism, we should to-day 
fail to understand the real Boswell. The fact is, Carlyle at- 
tempts to strain his theory of Hero-Worship farther than it 
will go. When he says, for example, that it was reverence for 
wisdom which drew Boswell to Johnson, he has to plac^ both 
Boswell and Johnson in a somewhat false position in order 
to support his claim. He seems to forget that when Tom 
Davies introduced them in 1763 Johnson was not so much "a 
poor rusty coated scholar," as the foremost literary figure in 
England. All of Johnson's important work, except the 
Shakespeare and the Lives, was done ; he had received a 
pension the previous year for literary merit alone, and he was 
to establish the famous " Club " a year later. With all his 
peculiarities, Johnson was a man to know. Now Boswell, 

"^ Essays, IV, 73-83. 



125 

beyond most men of his time or of any other, had " a rage for 
literature," as Hume called it ; or, to use the phrase of Horace 
Walpole, he had " a rage of knowing anybody that was ever 
talked of." He deliberately sought out literary celebrities. 
He visited Voltaire at Ferney, Rousseau at Mortier, and in 
London he was never vainer than when dining with Reynolds, 
Garrick, Goldsmith, Beauclerk or Hume. To be with the 
great Cham himself, greatest of them all, was Boswell's highest 
felicity ; then it was that the satellite shone most brightly. So 
far from having all to lose in seeking out Johnson, as Carlyle 
implies, Boswell had everything to gain. Nor does Carlyle's 
explanation of Boswell's art tell the whole truth. Hero- 
worship and Carlyle's general theory of art, as, in the deepest 
sense, an unconscious process, led him to keep out of sight the 
skilled and untiring craftsmanship that went to the making of 
the Life. Of course, in the deepest sense the art of Boswell, 
like that of any other craftsman, was unconscious; for he 
could not have explained, nor can we explain, why the gift of 
biography came to him and not, let us say, to Hawkins. Love 
and reverence for Johnson were also an indispensable part of 
Boswell's equipment. But unless he had cultivated these gifts, 
as we know he did, with the greatest patience and in obedience 
to the most deliberately determined ideals, he would not have 
produced a masterpiece which the reading world has never 
ceased to praise. The Life of itself proclaims the craftsman- 
ship of Boswell in every chapter. But we know from numer- 
ous external sources how he labored for seven years, collecting 
materials, sifting, selecting, quizzing this person and that, 
ceaselessly searching for the least bit of information that would 
add to the completeness and lifelikeness of his portrait. If we 
think of these efforts, we may find it difficult to believe that 
Boswell's love and reverence, unsupported by a hundred follies 
and foibles and all manner of disgusting assiduities, would 
ever have been equal to the great and prolonged task which he 
set himself to do. The true interpretation of Boswell is best 
reached, perhaps, by a compromise between Macauley and 
Carlyle. It was by reason of his follies as well as his virtues — 
if one keeps to these terms — that Boswell realized his artistic 



126 

ideals. He was neither the unquaHfied fool of Macaulay's 
portrait, nor the martyr-hero of Carlyle's ; he was something 
of both, it is true, but he was also a craftsman of the first 
rank, working by conscious processes, toward self-appointed 
ends. 

But whatever be the true interpretation of the processes by 
which Boswell achieved his art, there can be no two opinions 
of its accomplishment. For Carlyle at any rate the case was 
clear; he found Boswell's work good because it revealed to 
him a personality which aroused his deepest interest and sym- 
pathy. We have already implied in the previous section of 
this chapter that the unique and profound relationship between 
Carlyle and Burns was spiritual ; and now at the risk of con- 
fusing language we wish to point out that the remarkable 
sympathy between Carlyle and Johnson was largely intellectual. 
Affinity with Burns moreover was partly a matter of pity; it 
was the feeling of the strong man toward the weak. Affinity 
with Johnson was wholly due to the liking of one strong man 
for another. The mind of Carlyle indeed touches that of 
Johnson at so many points that at times it is hard to avoid 
fancying that a great spirit of the eighteenth century became 
reincarnated in the nineteenth. Johnson, like Carlyle, was a 
stoic, a hater of cant and sham, a man who renounced happi- 
ness as his rule of life. Both were passionately interested in 
human nature, delighting in biography and believing in the 
power of a really great man to turn his abilities to any account. 
In political principles as in ethical, the two men were singu- 
larly alike. To Johnson the doctrine of political equality was 
mere moonshine. He despised the teachings of Rousseau and 
he regarded agitators of the Wilkes type with contempt. He 
cherished a superior disregard of the people and (to use the 
words of Mrs. Piozzi) he expressed "a zeal for insubordina- 
tion warm even to bigotry." While these political opinions 
would apply more obviously to the Carlyle of 1850 than to the 
Carlyle of 1832, they are in reality true of him at any period 
of his manhood, for he was ever as full of " intuitive aver- 
sions " as was Johnson. We might extend the parallel into 
the less tangible realm of temperament, for each life was over- 



127 

shadowed with melancholy or lighted at intervals with flashes 
of saturnine and ironic humor, and in each there dwelt a 
religious seriousness toward every human interest. Both 
Johnson and Carlyle were " characters " in their time, bold, 
independent, dominating, original ; and both will live for future 
generations as men rather than as writers. In all or in nearly 
all of Carlyle's writing there is the " deep lyric tone " which 
he confesses to find in Johnson the man. It is because of this 
manifold and intimate sympathy that Carlyle, after Boswell, is 
the most inspired interpreter of Johnson. His essay, though 
not so well balanced as some earlier ones, deserves the praise 
of Edward Fitzgerald, who thought that it judged Johnson 
" for good and all." 

The interpretation of Johnson rests upon essentially the same 
ideals of biography as those set forth in the essay on Burns. 
It is not the outer but the inner Johnson that is presented ; not 
the eccentric, deformed giant of Macaulay's pages, but the 
" best intellect in England," a man belonging to the " keener 
order of intellects " such as Hume and Voltaire, a man " not 
ranking among the highest, or even the high, yet distinctly 
admitted into that sacred band." That is to say, Johnson is a 
priest and prophet whose life Carlyle frankly holds up as an 
answer to the question how to live, as the text to a sermon on 
hero-worship. The heroic aspects of Johnson's life are there- 
fore brought forward and exhibited in the most favorable light, 
while the essentially literary sides are left somewhat obscured. 
Carlyle sings a kind of paean over the early struggles of 
Johnson, and from the facts concerning Johnson's first days in 
London he selects material for some of his strongest para- 
graphs. 

As Carlyle saw it, the life problem of Johnson was two-fold, 
how to live and how to live by speaking only the truth. The 
problem was made doubly difficult, because the age was 
transitional in literature, in politics, in religion ; and because 
Johnson himself possessed a contradictory temperament. " It 
is not the least curious of the incoherences which Johnson had 
to reconcile," says Carlyle " that though by nature contemptu- 
ous and incredulous he was, at that time of day, to find his 



128 

safety and glory in defending with his whole might the tradi- 
tions of the elders." But Johnson kept a straight path through 
these tangled times, because he had " a knowledge of the tran- 
scendental, immeasureable character of Duty, the essence of all 
Religion." This is his great glory, this is the central fact of 
his life beside which all others are secondary and circum- 
stantial. In thus placing Johnson the moralist high above 
Johnson the man of letters, Carlyle exalts the hero at the 
expense of the man. He scarcely more than glances at the 
interesting figure who gathered the wits about him at the 
" Club " and who was celebrated as the first talker of London, 
the perennially delightful personality whom the world knows 
to-day through the pages of Boswell. 

We may infer from Carlyle's slight notice of Johnson as a 
man of letters that his interest in Johnson's writings is like- 
wise slight. Such is indeed the case. Intent upon interpreting 
Johnson as a moralist, the critic cares only for the spirit which 
shows through the Ramblers, the Idlers and the Lives. This 
spirit he finds to be an expression of Johnson's moral nature. 
Johnson " by act and word " was a Tory, " the preserver and 
transmitter of whatsoever was genuine in the spirit of Tory- 
ism." The motive of his life was duty, or truth in the tran- 
scendental sense; the work of his life was Toryism.^^ In a 
time of change, when even the foundations of society were in 
danger of being swept away, Johnson served England by re- 
sisting the rising tide of innovation. The moral endowment 
by which he effected this work was mainly courage, a belief in 
the " everlasting Truth, that man is ever a Revelation oi God 
to man," and, lastly, mercy and affection. Johnson's affection, 
Carlyle points out, manifested itself both as courtesy and as 
prejudice. Prejudice, again, was the virtue by which Johnson 
accomplished his mission — the mission of serving as the " John 
Bull of spiritual Europe." 

^ It should be understood that though he preaches duty and truth, 
Carlyle does not unconditionally preach the " Doctrine of Standing-Still." 
He does not glorify stagnation either in the individual or in the state. 
He says that " Johnson's aim was in itself an impossible one ; this of 
stemming the eternal Flood of time. The strongest man can but retard 
the current partially and for a short hour." 



129 

Sound and solid for the most part as is this appreciation, 
it suffers not a Httle from Carlyle's determination to see in 
Johnson only the hero. It is because prejudice was so colossal 
in Johnson and because he set himself in wilful and violent op- 
position to nearly every tendency of enlightenment of his times, 
that most critics cannot place him as high as Carlyle has done ; 
for we are to remember that Johnson was a tory, not alone in 
politics, but in religion and literature. He was not, moreover, 
a greater influence than Burke in checking the revolutionary 
spirit in England. Johnson died four years before the fall of 
the Bastile, having shown scarcely more than a churlish in- 
difference to France, while Boswell, at work on the biography 
from 1784 to 1 79 1, has no word concerning the social and polit- 
ical convulsion across the Channel.-- But we should remember 
that Carlyle himself was at all times prejudiced against polit- 
ical agitators and was not likely to distinguish beween a Burke 
and a Wilkes. We should remember also that this interpreta- 
tion of Johnson was written for readers of 1832 by a man who, 
though a radical in the philosophical, literary and religious 
sense, was on precisely the same fundamental principles a de- 
termined reactionary in politics and political economy. It was 
inevitable therefore that he should lift up the heroic figure of 
Johnson as an example to the men who were drifting through 
the distracted days of 1832-3. 

Of literary criticism in the restricted sense the essay has little 
more than a suggestion, though the suggestion indicates clearly 
enough how Carlyle regarded and ranked Johnson's work. 
" To Johnson's Writings, good and solid, and still profitable as 
they are, we have already rated his Life and Conversation as 
superior." " His Doings and Writings are not Sliozvs but 
Performances. Not a line, not a sentence is dishonestly done, 
is other than it pretends to be." Measured by Carlyle's stan- 
dard Johnson is not a poet. " Into the region of Poetic Art 
he indeed never rose ; there was no ideal without him avowing 
itself in his work." He could not reveal through his writings, 

-" Johnson's indirect influence must have been strong and far-reaching, 
making itself felt through literature and conversation to the remotest 
parts of great Britain. 



130 

as true poets can throup^h theirs, the Divine Idea. Johnson 
was a prophet because his character was a medium for tran- 
scendental duty ; but he was neither a seer nor a poet because 
his intellect could not transmit truth. From such judgment 
there is nothing to deduct. Critical opinion from the time of 
Burke and Coleridge does not differ essentially from Carlyle's 
as to the value of Johnson's writings. Even the late Dr. Bir- 
beck liill has declared that Johnson lives not in his writings 
but in his talk.^-"* Carlyle's sin in his interpretation of Johnson 
the writer is one of omission. He has failed to take account 
of Johnson as a literary influence, just as he failed to consider, 
except in a few sentences, Johnson as a man of letters. And it 
was in the literary sense, of course, not in the political, that 
Johnson was the dictator of the British public. We must go 
to other interpreters and critics, therefore, for an account of 
Johnson's place in literature from Pope to Wordsworth, even 
as we must turn to Boswell if we wish to know Johnson as a 
literary personality. But if we are content to know him as a 
moralist, as a great ethical force in the total English life of the 
eighteenth century, we shall find that Carlyle is Johnson's truest 
interpreter. 

(c) Scott 

The essay on Sir Walter Scott has increased the number of 
Carlyle's enemies and apologists. His enemies, or rather those 
who dislike the man and distrust his criticism, refer to this 
essay as a spiteful attack of one Scotchman upon his more 
favored and famous countryman. Mr. Lang, Scott's -most 
recent biographer, asserts that Carlyle was embittered against 
Scott " on a matter of an unanswered letter."-* On the other 
hand hVoude apologizes for Carlyle's unsympathetic tone on the 
ground that he was not yet recovered from the exhaustive 
labors on the French Revolution.-^ So much has been said at 
one time or another in way of censure or extenuation that we 
are justified in the present study in briefly reviewing the facts 
regarding the genesis of the essay and the relations of Carlyle 
with Scott. 

■'Dr. Johnson, His Friends and his Critics, 129. 

^ Life of Scott, 129. ^ Froude, Life, III, 103. 



131 

Carlyle was teaching mathematics at Annan Academy when 
Scott's novels began to appear. He declared that Waverley 
was the best novel that had been published " these thirty 
years,"-*' and he read many others with youthful pleasure and 
admiration. His attitude toward them, however, was not at 
all different from that toward nearly everything he read at this 
time. But during the next five or six years a great change took 
place. Carlyle's intellectual life was expanded and deepened 
by hard struggle with fortune and by a study of Goethe. In 
his crystallizing philosophy of life there was little or no place 
for minor poetry and fiction. It is perfectly consistent with 
this new turn, that Carlyle should make the following entry in 
his note-book : 

" Sir Walter Scott is the great Restaurateur of Europe : he might have 
been numbered among their Conscript Fathers ; he has chosen the worser 
part, and is only a huge Publicanus. What is his novel, any of them ? 
A bout of champagne, claret, port or even ale drinking. Are we wiser, 
better, holier, stronger ? No ! We have been amused. O Sir Walter, 
thou knowest too well, that Virtus laudatur et alget." 

A few months later occurs this entry : 

" Not one of Scott's Fairservices or Deanses, etc., is alive. As far as 
prose could go, he has gone ; and we have fair outsides ; but within all is 
hollow." " 

These private opinions were written down many months before 
there was a word of correspondence with Goethe concerning 
medals, and ten years before the essay was composed, and yet 
they might serve as texts for nearly everything that Carlyle 
ever said against the life and work of Scott. ^^ 

With this attitude of Carlyle's before us, let us turn to the 
unlucky episode of the unanswered letter. Goethe had long 
been an admirer of the author of Waverley. In testimony of 
his esteem he sent in 1828 two medals to Carlyle to be delivered 
to Scott. It was very natural for the German poet to suppose 

'^ Early Letters, lo. 

"Two Note-Books, 71, 126, years 1826 and 1827. 

^ In 1827 Jeffrey offered to introduce Carlyle to Scott, if Carlyle would 
present himself at the court room, Carlyle declined, but he wrote his 
brother, apropos of this incident, that Scott was no " mongrel," but a 
sufficient " hodman." Letters, 23, 67. 



132 

that the two Scotchmen were acquainted, though he had indeed 
expressed surprise to Eckermann that Scott had had nothing to 
say of Carlyle. Obviously Carlyle was flattered to be chosen 
the messenger between the most famous writer of Germany and 
the most famous writer of Great Britain, and he wrote Goethe 
that he expected to present the medals to Sir Walter in person. ^"^ 
Unhappily the meeting never took place, for Scott was in Lon- 
don at the time.^° Carlyle was disappointed not to see Scott 
and probably piqued not to hear from him. But was he so re- 
sentful and even so embittered as to allow his private feelings 
to condition his published criticism of Scott ten years later? 
Partisan friends of Sir Walter will probably continue to say 
that he was, even if they have to disregard the early note-book 
comments which we have quoted. They will continue to assert 
that Carlyle vented a " private bitterness," to use Mr. Lang's 
phrase, though to do so they will have to overlook entirely the 
complete conformity of the individual judgments in the essay to 
Carlyle's theory of literature and philosophy of life. On the 
other hand those who know Carlyle's habits of thought from 
1827 to 1837, and have examined the literary relations of Scott 
and Carlyle during these years will always find it hard to 
believe that the essay contains a critical opinion that it would 
not have contained had there been no incident of an unan- 
swered letter. Carlyle's central position toward Scott did not 
change after the incident, as certain privately expressed opin- 
ions fully show.^^ What he believed in 1827 he believed and 
expressed in 1837. If Carlyle's essay is to be interpreted 

" Goethe and Carlyle Corr., 83. 

30 " Walter Scott, I did not see, because he was in London ; nor hear of, 
perhaps because he was a busy or uncourteous man ; so I left his Goethe- 
medals to be be given him by Jeffrey" {Letters, 115). In correction of 
Norton's note to this passage it may be said that Carlyle must have known 
of Scott's financial troubles {Early Letters, 344). It was unfortunate that 
Carlyle never met Scott. He had more than one opportunity and he 
might have been won by Scott's personality. A regard for the man might 
have softened Carlyle's tone in the essay. But I do not believe that 
friendly relations would have caused Carlyle to alter opinions growing out 
of fundamental beliefs. Such relations did not alter them in the case of 
John Sterling. 

" Tzt'o Note-Books, 214-215; Froude, Life, II, 251. 



133 

fairly, therefore, we should regard it not as a piece of work 
inspired by resentment or jealousy, but as a deliberate criticism 
based upon ideals consistently held and consistently applied to 
literature for a period of ten years or more. 

In structure the essay is not so regular as many others, 
but in the main it shows an application of the biographical 
method to the interpretation of Scott's life and work, Carlyle, 
however, raises the question of Scott's greatness before he 
comes to systematic criticism. His answer furnishes us with a 
key to his whole position. Popularity, even the select popular- 
ity of Scott, he says, is no measure of greatness. The standard 
is quite other than that : it is spiritual power and the genius to 
reveal an idea that makes a man great. Scott is unspiritual 
because he has no deep passion and expresses no ideas. On the 
other hand he is " one of the healthiest of men." In a sick 
and artificial age this robust borderer was appointed by destiny 
" to be the song-singer and pleasant tale-teller to Britain and 
Europe. This is the history of the life and achievement of our 
Sir Walter Scott."^^ Carlyle's formula thus becomes clear at 
the start. Scott is not great, because he does not reveal the 
" Divine Idea " either in life or in work. He is, however, 
healthy in nearly all of his relations, and healthiness is the word 
by which his life and work are properly appreciated.^^ 

^^ Essays, VI, 38. 

^^ To show how repeatedly these standards are applied to man and 
author, I subjoin two groups of passages, (i) Want of ideas, want of 
spirituality; (a) "Friends to precision will probably deny his title to the 
name ' great.' One knows not what idea worthy of the name of great, 
what purpose, instinct or tendency, that could be called great, Scott was 
ever inspired with." (b) " The great Mystery of Existence was not great 
to him." (c) " A great man is ever, as the Transcendentalists speak, 
possessed with an idea." (rf) " Perhaps no literary man of any generation 
has less value than Scott for the immaterial part of his mission in any 
sense." (e) " Our highest literary man . . . had, as it were, no message 
whatever to deliver to the world." (/) " The candid judge will, in general, 
require that a speaker, in so extremely serious a universe as this of ours, 
have something to speak about." (g) Scott's letters " do not, in any case 
whatever, proceed from the innermost parts of the mind," ..." the 
man of the world is always visible in them." (h) The Waverley Novels 
" are altogether addressed to the everyday mind ; for any other mind there 



Subsequent judgments are made on the basis of this prelimi- 
nary estimate. Carlyle passes in rapid review the earlier 
periods of Scott's life, giving an undue prominence perhaps to 
certain " questionable doings " connected with the " Liddesdale 
raids." He regards the portentous Ballantyne connection as 
natural in a worldly man like Scott. He criticises Scott's 
poetry in a desultory manner and seems to consider it as an 
incident in the author's career and an explanation of this 
worldly success rather than as literature which merits serious 
appreciation. At all events, though he does not deny real 
worth of a kind in the metrical romances, Carlyle explains their 
immense vogue more on external than on internal grounds. 
His interest reaches its highest point when he discusses the 
culminating period of Scott's life, the period of the Waverley 
Novels. This was the critical time in the career of Scott, when 
it was to be seen whether he was guided by inner ideals or ex- 
ternal considerations. Carlyle's judgment of Scott's character 
at this point is significant. Though he pronounces the picture 
presented in the copious extracts from Lockhart's Life to be 
"very beautiful," he unequivocally asserts that Scott, at this 
period, " with all his health, was infected." Scott wrote im- 
promptu novels to buy farms with and his tragedy was due not 
to bankruptcy, but to false ambition. " His way of life," says 
Carlyle, " was not wise." Thus as in the case of Burns, the 

is next to no nourishment in them ; " " not profitable for doctrine, for 
reproof, for edification, for building up or elevating in any shape ; " " they 
do not form themselves on deep interests, but on comparatively trivial 
ones." (2) Healthiness; (a) Not a great man but " the healthiest o^ men." 
(b) " Were one to preach a sermon on Health, Scott ought to be the 
text." (c) The happiest circumstance of all is, that Scott had in himself 
a right healthy soul." (d) " Scott's healthiness showed itself decisively in 
all things, and nowhere more decisively than in this : the way in which 
he took his fame." (e) " If no skyborn messenger — a substantial, peace- 
able, terrestrial man." (/) " Letters they are of a most humane man of 
the world." (g) " Scott's rapidity is great, is a proof and consequence of 
the solid health of the man, bodily and spiritual." {h) "... in general 
healthiness of mind, these Novels prove Scott to have been amongst the 
foremost of writers." In connection with so many praises of Scott's 
health this passage should not be forgotten : " Alas, Scott with all his 
health, was infected." 



135 

critic pierces to the soul of Scott and interprets his failure 
solely upon spiritual grounds. This searching judgment of 
course carries with it the corollary that the Waverley Novels 
were in large measure the product of a commercialized mind. 

It was inevitable that this appreciation of the life and work 
of Scott should have aroused the anger of those who honored 
him as one of the most lovable and manly of men and as the 
most delightful story-teller of their day. But Carlyle's judg- 
ment is the expression of higher standards than the average 
critic is wont to apply to life and literature. He measured 
Scott in 1837 by exactly the same standards which he had ap- 
plied to Richter in 1827 and to Johnson in 1832. However 
manly or delightful Scott was he was not great or noble be- 
cause he did not dedicate his character and his art to the ex- 
pression of truth. In saying or implying this opinion, Car- 
lyle of course does not mean to suggest, as some seem to have 
supposed, that truth is a barren formula or thesis, or that it is 
synonymous with the Thirty-nine Articles. We have gone 
with him too far to suspect him of such shallow thinking. He 
hated the doctrinaire even more heartily than do some of his 
unfriendly critics. But he never departed from his belief that 
the life of a truly great man, whether poet or prophet, must 
be felt to be under the direction of some central purpose or 
idea, through which it becomes related to the vast invisible 
potentialities of the universe. Whether you call this inner 
force an idea, or a message, it is something which the great 
man will ever strive to utter and for the sake of which he is 
willing to sacrifice all else in life. 

Scott was not born for this kind of greatness. His mind 
was not spiritual in this lofty sense. It was not even intellec- 
tual, if by intellectuality we mean a passionate interest in 
abstract truth or in the deeper things of character and art, such 
as Browning had, for example. To Scott the world was not 
the vesture of an idea, as it was to Carlyle. Dreamer though 
he was, his dreams were always of a romantic, never of a mys- 
tical world. He was a medisevalist through and through, but 
he delighted in the mediasvalism of Ariosto, not of Dante. 
He was also an unaffected man of the world. " I have been no 



136 

sigher in the Shades," he said. " I love the virtues of rough- 
and-round men." He was human on every side, his nature 
was patriotic, paternal, social. What philosophy he pretended 
to have, he exercised in managing his everyday life. Carlyle 
is not indeed indifferent to these splendid qualities in Sir Wal- 
ter. He praises the good sense and sanity, the manliness, 
bravery and genial humanity of Scott, in passages of great 
beauty and power. But running through this golden character 
he saw a streak of baser metal, which in his opinion lowered 
its worth. He could no more approve of the building of Ab- 
botsford than he could approve of the ethics of Bentham or the 
political principles of the American people. Scott and Carlyle 
as men lived in different worlds and according to different 
standards. 

In art as well as in life their realms were widely sundered. 
Scott's literary ideals, as expressed in his own writings and 
in Lockhart's Life, are well known. He wrote to amuse, not 
to edify or to convey transcendental truth. He would not have 
understood, or if he had understood he would not have taken 
seriously, the Fichtean notion of the man of letters as a re- 
vealer of the " Divine Idea." He had no illusions concerning 
his position as a writer. Like Moliere he felt that his art 
served its ends if it brought applause from his audience. He 
considered literature a profession, not a martyrdom. He re- 
garded his ability to write books very much as a man to-day 
regards his business ability, as a means with which he may 
make a success of life both financially and socially. Author- 
ship as a calling to which one solemnly dedicates himself was 
farthest from Scott's thought ; that, as he said, was for the 
Shakespeares and the Molieres, but not for him. With these 
ideals, accompanied with such gifts as he had, Scott was for 
Carlyle a minor writer, not an artist of the first rank. And for 
minor writers the criticism of Carlyle has virtually no place, 
because they do not add new meanings to our conception of 
life. While Carlyle's interpretation of Scott reaches therefore 
negative conclusions and is expressed, we must- own, in a 
spirit sometimes needlessly harsh, it is as a whole entirely in 
harmony with his literary and critical doctrine. 



137 

The individual opinions or estimates which follow upon Car- 
lyle's general judgment are nearly all adverse, and some of 
them are so unbalanced as to indicate that his want of sym- 
pathy with the literature of amusement and with the kind of 
life that Scott lived got the better of his judgment. When, for 
example, he lumps Scott's characters together and says that 
they are created " from the skin inwards," he sees no differ- 
ence between the conventional heroes and heroines of the 
Waverley Novels and the genuine, if not heroic, figures 
drawn from humble life. When, again, he says that these 
novels are melodramatic and mechanically constructed, he lays 
the blame partly upon Scott's habits of extempore composition, 
without giving him any recognition for the labor of those 
early years when Scott was filling his mind with an inexhaus- 
tible store of material for his books. The truth is that Car- 
lyle is too ready to explain not only Scott's shortcomings as a 
man but his limitations as a literary artist upon the ground of 
his worldly ambitions as shown conspicuously in the building 
at Abbots ford. The critic gives way to the moralist, for in 
this instance he fails properly and fairly to correlate Scott's 
mind and temperament with his work, or carefully to con- 
sider Scott's whole view of literary craftsmanship. Undoubt- 
edly Scott's financial affairs and worldly ambitions influenced 
his work in literature. But considering his habitual attitude 
toward his art, before and after Abbotsford v/as built, it is 
safer to say that his work would not have been essentially 
different had there been no decorating of walls and no collect- 
ing of old armor. 

But Carlyle's waning interest in literature considered apart 
from ideas is responsible for many gaps in his appreciation of 
Scott. Scott's greatness as a story-teller, his amazing fertility 
in invention, his skill as a scene-painter are passed over. So, 
too, are his place and influence in the history of English litera- 
ture. Carlyle does indeed refer lightly to Scott's rela- 
tion to the "buff-belted watch-tower period of literature." 
But this is quite inadequate in the case of a far-extending in- 
fluence like Scott's. The essay therefore in spite of numerous 
flashes of inspired opinion and many brilliant word-pictures is 



138 

never likely to satisfy the reading world as an interpretation 
of Scott. As an analysis of the man it over-emphasizes his 
worldliness and in consequence fails to bring into proper relief 
the really great moral qualities of his character. As a critique 
of the author it fails even more decidedly because it is so 
largely incomplete and negative and because it explains Scott's 
defects as a writer too largely in terms of his moral weakness 
in building Abbotsford. But as a Carlyle document the essay 
is invaluable and it is likely to live as long as an interest in 
Carlyle endures. It is on all sides an exact expression of the 
man. In the study of Carlyle as critic it is of peculiar im- 
portance, for it is the best illustration we have of the applica- 
tion of his ideas of life, literature and criticism to a distin- 
guished writer whose works he regarded as of minor value, 
fit only to amuse the indolent or languid mind. 



CHAPTER IX 
From Criticism to Prophecy 

Although the essay on Sir Walter Scott was the last formal 
criticism that Carlyle wrote, it by no means marks the end of 
his interest in literature and in men of letters. Forty years 
from that time he read Gibbon through again and dipped into 
Swift, Sterne and Voltaire, and during all the intervening 
period, even while he was wrestling with his Cromzvell and 
his Frederick, his eye was keen to see the movements of men 
in the field of letters. In the earlier years of this later period 
he lectured on heroes and on the history of literature, and he 
wrote a life of his friend John Sterling; and in each instance 
he gave much evidence of his critical interest in literature. 
Evidence of a similar kind is abundant too, in reminiscences, 
letters, political pamphlets, and even in the ponderous histories 
themselves. Moreover Carlyle himself had now become one 
of the foremost figures in a great age of literature and he 
numbered among his friends and acquaintance nearly every 
English writer of high rank. He breathed the air in which 
great literature was created. He could not altogether escape 
it, if he would. Froude remarks that Carlyle read more mis- 
cellaneously than any man he had ever known, that he was as 
familiar with English literature as Macaulay and knew Ger- 
man, French and Italian literatures infinitely better. "His 
knowledge," says Froude, " was not in points or lines, but com- 
plete and solid."^ His views, however, remained essentially 
what they had been, though his language often became ridic- 
ulously extravagant in its expression of them. 

Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning he knew and liked as 
men but not as poets. He once spoke of Wordsworth's poetry 
as "pastoral pipings,"^ and Tennyson's Princess he thought 

^Froude, IV, 218. 

^ Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle, 55. 

139 



140 

"had cvcrythin}:^ bnt common sense, "•'* while in the Idylls he 
recognized " the inward perfection of vacancy."* He admired 
Browning's intellectual and spiritual power, but urged him to 
write in prose. The early Ruskin he did not care for, though 
he expressed high appreciation of Ruskin's later works. 
Emerson was a life-long friend and Carlyle praised the " tone 
of veracity " in his essays, though in later life he came to 
regard the American sage's writings as thin and moonshiny, 
like the articles in the Dial. Newman, Keble and Jowett, 
churchmen all, he spoke of in contemptuous terms. 

The novelists for the most part be dismissed in disgust, espe- 
cially Trollopc, Jane Austen, George Sand and Balzac. 
Thackeray, whom he disliked as a man, he rated higher than 
Dickens, whom he liked ; " Thackeray," he said to Sir Charles 
Duffy, "has more reality in him, and would cut up into a 
dozen Dickenses."''' His standard was the same in all cases. 
He praised the literature that seemed to him truthful, vera- 
cious, faithful to fact and reality, but he generally complained 
that the books of his day were either false or shallow and 
trifling, and that literature had fallen from its position of 
power. 

The fact is Carlyle was too deeply absorbed in his own work 
and mission and had gone too far along his own appointed 
path to appreciate fairly the work of his contemporaries. 
While a great and enduring literature was being created all 
about him, he stood apart as a prophet to preach to his 
generation his gospel of hero-worship and work. This posi- 
tion by which he is best known to the world Carlyle began to 
assume at a period that is coincident with his work upon 
Sartor Resartus, that is to say, from the fall of 1830 onward. 
From this time we may date the beginning of his change from 
criticism to prophecy. The causes of this change were several. 
When he went to London in 1831, for the second time, he 
found literature, as he believed, to be either dying or dead and 
offering no hope to one of his belief and purpose. His slight 
acquaintance with the foremost literary men of that day, Cole- 

" ICsijinassc, Literary Recollections, 214, 

* EincrsoH-Carlyle Corr., II, 340. ^Conversations, 76. 



141 

ridge, Hazlitt, Lamb and De Quincey, Godwin, Lockhart and 
Leigh Hunt, left him for the most part disheartened and dis- 
gusted with the profession of letters. It was indeed a time of 
transition. The age of romantic literature had culminated and 
the Victorian era was yet to come. Politics, too, and the state 
of society excited his gloomy apprehension. It was the time 
of reform agitation and Carlyle looked out upon a world adrift 
on change. He could not be content to write reviews when 
he saw, as he said in Sartor, " a world becoming dismantled." 
It was a time for the deliverance of his own message, the 
message he had learned partly from experience but largely 
from German literature and philosophy. It was not a time for 
reviewing a moribund English literature. Moreover Carlyle 
was tired of reviewing, he was wearied, he said, with scribbling 
for capricious editors for uncertain pay. He therefore went 
up to London in 183 1 with the manuscript of Sartor. He was 
about to abdicate the office of critic and to assume the role of 
prophet. Unable to find a publisher for Sartor, he wrote Char- 
acteristics for the Edinburgh Reviezv and his essay on Johnson 
for Frascr's Magazine, both articles announcing a change from 
criticism to prophecy.® J 

This change in office implies no alteration in Carlyle's phi- 
losophy of life or theory of poetry. Philosophy is poetry and ^ 
poetry is philosophy and both are life and reality: from this 
creed he never departed. It was no part of his literary theory 
that meter or rhyme is essential to poetry. He always laid the 
great emphasis upon the message, the meaning, the truth ex- * 
pressed. Upon this theory, it is the same if you say that 
poetry is life or that life is poetry; and Carlyle did declare in 
his first essay on Goethe that " all good men may be called 
poets in act, or in word."^ It is the same if you say that the 
poet is the highest man of his time or that the highest man of 
his time is a poet. The poet is he who expresses life, whether 

® Carlyle struggled for years to find a suitable form for his original 
work. As early as 1822 he experimented unsuccessfully with verse, but, 
as Froude says, he could not " master the mechanical difficulties of the 
art" (Froude, Life, I, 138, 205), He had tried the novel, but this also 
proved too refractory. ''Essays, I, 180. 



L 



142 

y in rhymes or in deeds. In an age, therefore, in which, as 
Carlyle sees it, life is not to be found in Hterature, he will turn 
for it to biography and to history. From 1831 he finds poetry, 
reality, that is, less and less in literature and more and more 
in the lives of great men. Goethe the poet becomes Goethe 
the hero. Transcendental truth, no longer discoverable in the 
books that men write, is to be found in the lives that heroes 
have lived. 

Evidences of this transition from criticism to prophecy are 
to be seen everywhere in the essays written after 1830. Even 

"t^ in one essay of 1830, the second Richtcr, Carlyle points out that 
he is now looking from the poem to the poet.^ In the Schiller 
(1831) he disgresses to discuss happiness and to condemn 
utilitarian ethics. From 1830 onward he refers more and 
more often to "our age." Hardly an essay but echoes the 
reform movement or contains references to the French Revo- 
lution. Some essays, for example Mirabeau, are wholly 
biographical and historical, while others, as Diderot, show that 
Carlyle has greater interest in history and biography than in 
literature. The message is the thing. We hear now from 
Sauerteig, Smelfungus, Teufelsdrockh, who are introduced to 
give harangues on the great man and his uses. It would be 
possible indeed to regard all the later and greater essays as 
tracts for the times, though to do this we should be laying 
emphasis upon certain features at the expense of others. In 
Voltaire, which is a little earlier than the period of prophecy, 
Carlyle is declaring against skepticism and denial; in Diderot 
he preaches against mechanism and a mechanical age. Even 

^. the essay on Scott, last of the critical essays, is from one 
point of view a declaration against worldliness. On the other 
hand the essay on Boszvell's Life on Johnson is written partly for 
the purpose of presenting to a drifting social order the figure 
of a man who held fast to duty ; while the second Goethe holds 
up the true prophet for the time, the man who builds, who has 
lived a whole life, in contrast to the man of Carlyle's time, who 
destroys and who has lived only a half life. The change from 
criticism to prophecy becomes more apparent still, if we con- 

* Essays, III, 5. 



143 

trast the first with the second essay on Goethe, the essay on ^^ 
Voltaire with that on Diderot. In the earher essays the treat- 
ment is distinctly more literary, more critical, the men are more 
broadly discussed as men of letters and the critic is interested 
in the men and their work more for their own sake and less 
for the purpose of advancing a message. In the later essays _J 
the prophet frequently replaces the critic. " For us in these 
days," wrote Carlyle, "prophecy (well understood), not 
poetry, is the thing wanted. How can we sing and paint when 
we do not yet believe and see?"^ Therefore Carlyle stands 
apart to preach against Coleridgean philosophy and shovel- 
hattism, Benthamite Ethics and the whole doctrine of utili- 
tarianism, against reform and the new democracy, against in- 
dustrialism and laizaez faire. At exactly the time when Tenny- 
son was leading in a new age of poetry, Carlyle was " throwing 
down his critical assaying balance."^'' He now began to ^ 
declare that not the poet only, but every worker " bodies forth j^' 
the forms of Things Unseen. "^^ ./ 

' Froude, Life, II, 299. 

^"Essays, IV, 184. See the opening paragraph to Corn-Law Rhymes \j Id^' 
for Carlyle's farewell to criticism. 
"Past and Present, 176. 



-7 



CHAPTER X 
Carlyle's Criticism 

Carlyle's literary criticism, like all human products, has its 
defects and its merits, its weakness as well as its strength. 
Of the four great requisites of a critic — insight, knowledge, 
sympathy and detachment — he possessed the first two in large 
measure, but he was often wanting in sympathy and he was 
seldom able to maintain the judicial attitude towards his ma- 
terial. If he is in sympathy with his writer, as in the case of 
Goethe, his position is confessedly that of an advocate. Like 
the lawyer he is for or against the question at issue: if in an 
author he discovers merits, it is to praise them; if he finds 
defects, it is to condemn them. He does not sit apart and 
coolly exercise the function of a judge. In truth as Carlyle 
grew older, he showed less and less of the ideal temper and 
taste of the critic. Where his taste and sympathy were not ap- 
pealed to, he was apt to become intolerant and sometimes 
frankly antagonistic. His tastes and sympathies, moreover, 
excluded a large area of literature from the field of his interest, 
and hence his services to criticism were very considerably 
limited. Carlyle was by nature deficient in sympathy with 
two great forms of literature, the novel and the drama. Of 
the novel regarded as a medium for the communication of a 
philosophy of life or a theory of education and culture, such as 
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, he of course made an exception. 
The dramas too of Shakespeare, Goethe and Schiller, con- 
sidered apart from the theatre and solely as interpretations of 
life, he read and wrote about with enthusiasm. But interest in 
story, plot, or character-development he had little, even from 
the first. His theory of art, as well as his taste and sympathy, 
left but a small place for purely imaginative, as distinguished 
from interpretative, literature. He did not care for the sensu- 
ous poetry of Keats, for the ethereal music of Shelley, or for 

144 



145 

the witchery in the poetry of Coleridge. He found Httle good 
and much harm or frivolousness in the poetry of Byron and 
Scott. Carlyle went to poetry for ideas, and in the imaginative 
poetry of Enghsh romanticism he declared that he found none. 
Such poetry was therefore beyond the reach of his criticism. 

The rhythm, the music, the phrase, in short the form of liter- 
ature, did not much interest Carlyle. -^As we have pointed out 
in a previous chapter, it was no part of his doctrine that poetry 
should be in metrical language. He delighted in the songs of 
Burns and in some of Goethe, but these were exceptions. 
With almost the single exception of the essay on Burns, his 
criticism takes no notice of what Coleridge praises in the poetry 
of Wordsworth, the "strength and originality," ^the " curiosa 
felicitas" of single lines and paragraphs. (This attitude is 
shown also in his want of interest in minor writers, whose 
appeal is so apt to be one of lines or stanzas, but not one of 
solid meanings and a single body of ideas. ' So intent was he : 
to discover ideas and to proclaim them when found that Carlyle 
sometimes indeed goes to the very opposite extreme to sestheti- 
cism. He becomes didactic. Even the earlier essays are not 
entirely free from this tendency and the later ones show a 
good deal of it. He steers clear of the dangers of neo-classic j^ 
criticism, but he does not wholly escape the perils of a criticism ■ 
that emphasizes the moral value of ideas. 

Over against these shortcomings are to be set certain merits 
in Carlyle's work as a critic. He possessed knowledge and _ 
insight not surpassed by any critic of his period. In knowl- 
edge alone he was superior to Lamb or Hazlitt and hardly 
equalled by Coleridge, whose knowledge, at all events, was „ 
far less coherent than Carlyle's. His insight, his sheer power ^_ 
to interpret the vital values of literature, was at its best ^'ery 
great. He believed with Hazlitt that a critic should fix his \^ 
ideas at the center, not at the circumference, of life and litera- 
ture. Goethe, acknowledged Carlyle's ability in this direction. 
He thought it remarkable that Carlyle in his criticism of Ger- 
man authors should seek out the spiritual and moral kernel; 
the Scot, he said, seeks to penetrate the work. Carlyle's 
knowledge and insight are amply displayed in the massive 






146 

essays that he wrote. He was drawn to great writers, he 
delighted to study them in relation to their age and to extract 
from the volume of their writings the sum-total of their 
criticism of life. To do this great knowledge and great inter- 
pretative power are necessary. The critic must have interests 
bcyong the merely literary, he must be competent to under- 
stand and interpret influences, social and political, religious and 
philosophical, that have united to shape great minds, tsuch for 
example, as Goethe, Voltaire and Diderot. Carlylc resembles 
Goethe(himself \in his ability to bring to the interpretation of 
men and books a wide knowledge and a rare power of penetra- 
tion. If to this insight and information we add his spirit of 
independence, his moral force in breaking away from tradi- 
tion and convention, we must admit that Carlyle was fitted to 
perform a substantial and permanent service for English lite- 
rary criticism. . ! 
r This service may be summarized briefly. In the first place 
Carlyle defined more clearly and accurately than contemporary 
English critics the aims and methods of the new criticism. 
He was the first to define the historical method, and he carried 
the use of it further than did other critics of his day. He 
prepared the way for the criticism that has gained so much 
, favor and currency in recent years, a criticism in which litera- 
'■ ture is interpreted in relation to the life of its creator and to 
the age in which he lived. Carlyle saw more clearly than his 
contemporaries the value of the comparative method ; and in 
his German essays he made much use of this method in tracing 
parallel streams of influence in German and English roman- 
ticism. Secondly, Carlyle deserves a permanent place in Eng- 
lish criticism as an introducer of German literature, especially 
that of Goethe, into England. From 1828 to 1850 he was the 
best, indeed almost the only, interpreter of German thought in 
England, and he was recognized as the critic who had done 
most to spread the knowledge of it among English people. 
Goethe's first great critic in England was Carlyle. Thirdly, 
Carlyle at his best was (apart from his pioneer service for 
German literature) a really great interpreter of men of letters 
and of literature. He was the first to recognize the genius of 



147 

Boswell and he was the first Englishman of importance to 
interpret Voltaire. His essays on Burns and on Johnson are • 
still the best of their class. These are services of themselves 
substantial enough to entitle Carlyle to a worthy place in the ; 
history of English criticism. Finally we must add the work 
that he did in common with otlier English critics of romanti- 
cism. He lent his knowledge and his insight, his moral courage 
and his intellectual independence, to the establishment of the 
cardinal principle in all modern criticism, that literature is to 
be judged, as Professor Saintsbury expresses it, "not by 
adjustment to anything else, but on its own merits."^ 

^ Hist, of Criticism, III, 4. 



INDEX 



Aeschylus, 4, i8 

Age of Wordsworth, 28, 76 

Akenside, Mark, 7 

Alison, Archibald, Rev., 63 

Anabasis, 7 

Anti-Jacobin, 97 

Arabian Nights, The, 5 

Ariosto, 13s 

Aristotle, 34 

Arnim, von, Ludwig, 80 

Arnold, Matthew, 98, 119 

A tola, 78 

Austen, Jane, 140 

Baillie, Joanna, 18, 83 

Ball, Margaret, 68, 93 

Balzac, 140 

Batteaux, 62 

Bayle, Pierre, 112 

Beaumont and Fletcher, 85 

Beckford, William, 87 

Beers, Henry A,, 76, 80 

Bentham, Jeremy, 136 

Bielschowsky's Life of Goethe, 39, 77 

Biographia Literaria, 35, 58 . 

Biography, Carlyle's Essay on, 88 

Black Dwarf, The, 8 

Blackwood's Magazine, 57, 58, 66, 
9S, 96, 97 

Blair, Hugh, 62, 67, 68 

Blair's Lectures, 62 

Boileau, 62 

Bolingbroke, Henry Saint John, Vis- 
count, 104 

Bossu, 62, 67, 68 

Boswell, James, 30, 33, 121-130, 147 

Boswell's Life of Johnson, 30, 114, 
121, 142 

Boyesen, H, H., 28, 31 

Brandes, Georg, 34 

Brentano, Clemens, 80 

Brewster, Dr., 15, 16, 19, 20, 22 

Brownell, W. C, i 

Browning, Robert, 135, 139, 140 

BuUer, Charles, 20, 23 



Burger, Gottfried August, 92, 96 

Burke, Edmund, 74, 130 

Burney, Fanny, 104 

Burns, Carlyle's Essay on, 83, 114, 

122 
Burns, Robert, 2, 30, 43, 51, 54, 55, 

82, 115-121, 126, 14s, 147 
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 6, 13, 

43, 82, 84, 89, 93, 119 

Calderon, 85 

Campbell, Thomas, 7, 23 

Candide, 105 

Carlyle, Alexander, 23 

Carlyle, Margaret, 2, 21 

Carlyle, Thomas, Conway's Life of, 

2, 4 
Carlyle, Thomas, Froude's Life of, 

2, 3, 4, 10, IS, 16, 18, 19, 23, 38, 

48, 66 
Carlyle, Thomas, Garnett's Life of, 

18 
Carlyle, Thomas, Nichol's Life of, 

18 
Cervantes, 87, 108 
Characteristics, Carlyle's Essay, 32, 

44, 80, 102, 114, 141 
Chateaubriand, 78, 79 
Chaucer, 54 

Childe Harold, 8, 84 

Cicero, 4, 7, 

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, first earl 

of 21 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 23, 28, 34, 

35, 36, S8, 69, 70, 71, 78, 84, 94. 

95, 96, 130, 140, 145 
Coleridge, Life of, Brandl's, 91 
Condorcet, de. Marquis, 109 
Confessions of Rousseau, 58, 78 
Congreve, William, 5, 104 
Constantine, 18 
Conway, Moncure D., 2, 7 
Cook's Voyages, 5 
Corneille, 85 
Cornwall, Barry, 23, 24 



148 



149 



Cromwell, Oliver, Carlyle's, 139 
Cromwell, Hugo's, 78 
Cromwell, Oliver, 21 

Dante, 42, 54, 110, 135 

David, 18 

Davies, Tom, 124 

Defense of Poetry, Shelley's, 29 

Defoe, Daniel, 87 

De Quincey, Life of, Japp's, 10 

De Quincey, Thomas, 23, 67, 84, 95, 

141 
Dial, The, 140 
Dialogues des Marts, 7 
Diamond Necklace, The Carlyle's 

Essay on, 78 
Dichtitng und Wahrheit, 39, 96, 102 
Dickens, Charles, 140 
Diderot, 42, 51, 53, 54, 146 
Diderot, Carlyle's Essay on, 52, 78, 

142 
Dionysius, 9 
Disraeli, Benjamin, 87 
Divine Comedy, The, 54 
Dryden, John, 74 
Duffy, Sir Charles, 140 

Eckermann, J. P., 132 
Edinburgh Address, Carlyle's, 72 
Edinburgh Encyclopedia, The, 15, 16 
Edinburgh Review, 16, 24, 25, 57, 58, 

62, 63, 66, 67, 82, 96, 97, 114, 122, 

141 
Edinburgh Sketches, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 

13, 19 
Egan, Pierce, 87 
Emerson, R. W., 140 
Emerson Works, 4 
Epigoniad, 7 
Essays, Hume's, 7 
Essays in Literature, Saintsburg's 68 

Faust, Goethe's, 20, 93, 96, 97, 100 

Fenelon, 7 

Ferguson, Robert, 120 

Fichte, J. G., 28, 31, 35, 36, 41, 57, 

59, 75 
Fielding, Henry, 5, 87 
Fitzgerald, Edward, 127 
Ford, John, 65 
Foreign Review, 93, 105 



Fouque, Baron de la Motte, 79, 80, 

86, 97 
Fox, George, 21 
Eraser, James, 114 
Eraser's Magazine, 141 
Frederick the Great, 10, 21, 
Froude, J. A., 139 

Garnett, Richard, 115 

Garrick, David, 125 

Gates, Prof. L. E., 64 

Gay, John, 104 

German Influence in English Liter- 
ature, Perry's, 97 

German Playwrights, Carlyle's Es- 
say on, 28 

German Romance, Carlyle's trans- 
lations from, 24, 25, so, 52, 60, 
78, 86, 98 

Germany, Madame de Staels', 8, 11, 
57, 58, 96, 97 

Gespr'dche, Goethe's, 39, 61 

Gibbon, Edward, 8, 19, 104, 139, 

Gifford, William, 68 

Gil Bias, 5 

Godwin, William, 141 

Goethe, 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 22, 23, 
28, 29, Z2, 3Z, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 
42, 45, 49, SI, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 
60, 62, 66, 67, 72, 76, 77, 81, 82, 
83, 8s, 86, 90, 92-95, 97-103, 
106-7, 131, 142, 144-6 

Goethe, Carlyle's Essays on, 31, 46, 
49, 122, 142 

Goldsmith, Oliver, 74, 87, 125 

Gordon, Margaret, 14 

Gotz von Berlichingen, 77, 79, 84, 
93, 100, 102 

Gray, Thomas, 74, 122 

Grillparzer, Franz, 30, 85, 97 

Haller, 96 

Hamlet, 60, 61 

Hampden, John, 21 

Harper, Prof. G. H., 48 

Hayley, William, 84 

Hazlitt, William, 28, 36, 58, 69, 70, 

71, 84, 105, 119, 141, 145 
Heine, Heinrich, 30, 77, 81 
Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 30 
Heldenbuch, 81 



150 



Helena, Carlyle's Essay on, 76 

Helena, Goethe's, 81 

Hemens, Felicia, 84 

Herder, von, J. G., 57, 62, 95 

Herford, C. H., 76 

Heroes and Hero Worship^ Carlyle's 

44, 
Hernani, Hugo's, 78 
Hill, George Birbeck, 130 
Historic Survey of German Poetry, 

Taylor's, 92 
History of Criticism, Saintsbury's, 

62, 68, 147 
History of England, Hume's, 5 
History of English Poetry, Warton's, 

54 
History of Frederick the Great, 139 
History of the French Revolution, 

Carlyle's, 78, 115, 130 
History of Scotland, Robertson's, 5 
History of the Thirty Years War, 

Schiller's, 12 
Hoffmann, 29, 79, 80, 81, 86, 93 
Homer, 4, 7 
Horace, 4, 34 
Hugo, Victor, 78, 79 
Hume, David, 7, 8, 35, 64, 104, 125 
Hunt, Leigh, 141 

Idylls of the King, Tennyson's, 140 
Irving, Edward, 7, 8, 22, 23 

Jardine, Robert, 10, 11 

Jeffrey, Francis, 24, 25, 30, 61-68, 

70, 114, 119, 132 
Job, 18 
Johnson, Samuel, 42, 51, 54, 61, 74, 

84, 107, 121-130, 147 
Jolley Beggars, The, 119 
Jowett, Benjamin, 140 

Kames, Lord, 61, 62, 75 

Kant, 2Z, 35, 36, 57, 59, 94, 95, 108 

Keats, John, 29, 35, 84, 144 

Keble, John, 140 

Klopstock, 10, 91 

Kotzebue, von, A. F,, 10, 44, 85, 92, 

94 
Korner, K. T., 96, 97 
Knox, John, 114 

La Henriade, 104 



Lalla Rookh, 8 

Lamb, Charles, 58, 69, 71, 96, 119, 
141, 145 

Lang, Andrew, 130, 132 

Lang's Life of Lockhart, 68 

Lang's Life of Scott, 130 

La Pucelle, 7, 109 

La Rouchefoucault, 8 

Laud, William, 21 

Lectures on Dramatic Literature, 
A. W. Schlegel's, 57, 96 

Leonidas, 7 

Leslie Professor, 3 

Lessing, 57, 91, 92, 95, 97 

Letters on the Aesthetic Education 
of Man, 37 

Lettres Provinciates, 8 

Lewes, George Henry, 98 

Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 8, 87, 93 

Litterary Criticism in the Renais- 
sance, Spingarn's, 34 

Locke, John, 35, 64, 109 

Lockhart, John Gibson, 66, 68, 91, 
96, 119, 141 

Lockhart' s Life of Scott, 134, 136 

London Magazine, 12, 22, 95 

London Times, 23 

Lope de Vega, 85 

Louis the Fifteenth, 104, 108, iii, 
112 

Lucan, 7 

Lucinde, F. Schlegel's, 80 

Luther, Martin, 114 

Lyrical Ballads, 58. , 

Macaulay, T. B., 82, 122, 127, 139 

Mackail, J. W., 28, 

Macpherson, James, 84 

Mahrchen, Goethe's, 81 

Main Currents in Nineteenth Cen- 
tury Literature, Brandes, 80 

Manfred, Byron's, 62 

Masson, David, 12 

Massinger, 85 

Messias, 1 

Metrical Legends, Joanna Baillie's 
18, 19, 83 

Milton, John, 11, 21 

Mirabeau, 142 

Mirabeau, Carlyle's Essay, 78 

Mitchell, Robert, 6, 9, 17 



151 



Moliere, 7, 66, 85, 136 
Monk, The, 8 
Montaigne, 8, 16, 87 
Monthly Magazine, 67, 92 
Monthly Register, 94 
Monthly Review, 92, 97 
Moore, Thomas, 13, 82 
Miillner, 97 

Napier, 82, 88, 114 

New Edinburgh Review, 12, 14, 18 

New Letters and Memorials of Jane 

Welsh Carlyle, 4 
Newman, 140 
Niebelungen Lied, 80, 81 
Norton, C. E., 10, 132 
Novalis, 29, 30, 39, 40, 43, 73, 79. 

81, 88 
Novalis, Carlyle's Essay, 35, 75 

Oberon, Wieland's, 7 

Oedipe, 104 

Orleans, Duke of, 108 

Pascal, no 

Past and Present, Carlyle's, 44, 75, 

143 
Paul, 18 

Pelham, 87, 88 
Pharsalia, Lucan's, 7 
Philosophical Dictionary, 112 
Piozzi, Mrs., 126 
Pitt, William, 16 
Plato, no 
Plato, no 

Pope, Alexander, 61, 68, 104, 120 
Porter, Jane, 7 
Princess, The, Tennyson's, 139 
Principia, Newton's, 7 
Principles of Knowledge, Berkeley's, 

7 

Quarterly Review, 57, 58, 104 

Rabelais, 87 
Racine, 62 

Radcliffe, Mrs. Anne, 87 
Ramsey, Allan, 120 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 125 
Richardson, Samuel, 87 
Richter, Jean Paul, Carlyle's Es- 
says on, 50, 76, 142 



Richter, Jean Paul, 25, 28, 30, 39, 

43, 57, 73, 86, 95, 97, 98, 122, 

135 
Robbers, The, Schiller's, 79, 81 
Robinson, Henry Crabb, 2;^, 92, 94, 

95, 96 
Romanticism in the Nineteenth 

Century, Beer's, 76, 80 
Royce, Josiah, 39 
Rousseau, J. J., 57, 58, 78, 79, 88, 

III, 125, 126 
Ruskin, John, 140 

Sainte Beuve, 48 

Saintsbury, George, 61, 68, 147 

Sartor Resartus, Carlyle's, 6, 18, 27, 

Z(>, 45, 79, 87, 102, 114, 

121, 140, 141 
Sand, George, 79, 140 
Schelling, 35, 36, 75 
Schiller, 10, 11, 12, 17, 19, 29, 35, 

37, 40, 41, 57, 59, 61, 62, 83, 8s, 

90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 144 
Schiller, Carlyle's Essay on, 142 
Schiller, Life of, Carlyle's, 12, 22, 

23, 37, 48, 49, 63, 85 
Schlegel, A. W., 35, 36, 59, 79, 94 
Schlegel, F., 28, 40, 59, 80 
Scottish Chiefs, 7 
Scott, Sir Walter, 6, 8, 30, 31, 33, 

51, 54, 68, 75, 82, 84, 88, 92, 93, 

107, 119, 130-138, 14s 
Scott, Sir Walter, Carlyle's Essay 

on, 114 
Scott, Sir Walter, as a Critic of 

Literature, 68, 93 
Shakespeare, 18, 29, 32, 33, 54, 68, 

8s, no, 144 
Shelley, Mrs., 87 
Shelley, P. B., 29, 35, 82, 84, 96, 

97, 144 
Shenstone, William, 120 
Signs of the Times, Carlyle's, 114 
Smollet, Tobias, 5, 8 
Solomon, 18 
Sophocles, 4 
Southey, Robert 96 
Spectator, The, 5, 7 
Spingarn, J. E., 34 
Stael, Mme. de, 8, 10, 65 



152 



State of German Literature, The, 
Carlyle's Essay on, ii, 35, 37, 46, 
60, 67, 75 

Sterling, John, 98, 132, 139 

Sterling, John, Life of, Carlyle's, 2, 
88 

Sterne, Laurence, 87, 139 

Stevenson, R. L., 84 

Swift, Jonathan, 104, 139 

Tales of My Landlord, 8 

Tarn o' Shanter, 119 

Tasso, Hoole's, 7 

Taylor, William, 62, 91, 92, 93, 94, 

96 
Tennyson, 139, 143 
Thackery, 140 
Thaddeus of Warsaw, 7 
Thomson, James, 120 
Tieck, 59, 78, 79, 80, 83, 86, 94 
Tom Jones, 87 
Tristram Shandy, 87 
Trollope, A., 140 

Vicar of Wakefield, The, 43 

Victorian Prose Masters, 1 

Virgil, 4 

Vivian Grey, 87 

Voltaire, 7, 28, 30, 42, 51, 54, 62, 

78, 79, 100-2, 104-13, I2S, 139, 

146, 147 



Voltaire, Carlyle's Essay on, 51, 78, 
142 

Walpole, Horace, 104, 125 
Warton, Thomas, 54 
Waugh, Baillie, 18-20 
Waverley, 7, 8, 62, 84, 131 
Waverley Novels, 84, 88, 134, 13s, 

137 

Welsh, Jane, 11, 12, 18, 21, 22, 23, 
24, 38, 82 

Werner, Z., 79, 80, 81, 88 

Werter, Sorrozvs of, 51, 77, 79, 91, 
100, 102, 103 

Wieland, 7, 91, 92, 94 

Wilhelm, Meister, Carlyle's transla- 
tion of, 12, 22, 23, 58, 66, 85, 88, 
96, 98 

Wilhelm Meister, Goethe's 30, 38, 
51, 58, 60, 61, 6s, 67, 77, 78, 83, 
86, 93, 100, loi, 103, 144 

Wilkes, John, 126 

Wilson, John, 68 

Winkelmann, 57 

Wordsworth, William, 28, 29, 35, 
58, 69, 70, 71, 74, 78, 82, 84, 95, 
96, 119, 139, 14s 

Wotton Reinfred, 24, 31 

Xenophon, 7 
Zaire, 105 



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